Eur. Phys. J. C (2014) 74: 3047
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-3047-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Wightman function and the Casimir effect for a Robin sphere in a constant curvature space

¹ INFN, Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Via Enrico Fermi 40, 00044, Frascati, Italy
² Department of Physics, Yerevan State University, 1 Alex Manoogian Street, 0025, Yerevan, Armenia

^* e-mail: saharian@ysu.am

Received: 1 August 2014
Accepted: 27 August 2014
Published online: 11 September 2014

Abstract

We evaluate the Wightman function, the mean field squared and the vacuum expectation value of the energy–momentum tensor for a scalar field with the Robin boundary condition on a spherical shell in the background of a constant negative curvature space. For the coefficient in the boundary condition there is a critical value above which the scalar vacuum becomes unstable. In both the interior and the exterior regions, the vacuum expectation values are decomposed into the boundary-free and sphere-induced contributions. For the latter, rapidly convergent integral representations are provided. In the region inside the sphere, the eigenvalues are expressed in terms of the zeros of the combination of the associated Legendre function and its derivative and the decomposition is achieved by making use of the Abel–Plana type summation formula for the series over these zeros. The sphere-induced contribution to the vacuum expectation value of the field squared is negative for the Dirichlet boundary condition and positive for the Neumann one. At distances from the sphere larger than the curvature scale of the background space the suppression of the vacuum fluctuations in the gravitational field corresponding to the negative curvature space is stronger compared with the case of the Minkowskian bulk. In particular, the decay of the vacuum expectation values with the distance is exponential for both massive and massless fields. The corresponding results are generalized for spaces with spherical bubbles and for cosmological models with negative curvature spaces.