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JOURNALS // Pis'ma v Zhurnal Èksperimental'noi i Teoreticheskoi Fiziki // Archive

Pis'ma v Zh. Èksper. Teoret. Fiz., 2001 Volume 73, Issue 8, Pages 419–423 (Mi jetpl4362)

This article is cited in 6 papers

GRAVITY, ASTROPHYSICS

Mesoscopic Casimir forces in quantum vacuum

G. E. Volovikab

a Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology
b L. D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: Traditionally it is assumed that the Casimir vacuum pressure does not depend on the ultraviolet cut-off. There are, however, some arguments that the effect actually depends on the regularization procedure and thus on the trans-Planckian physics. We provide the condensed matter example where the Casimir forces do explicitly depend on the microscopic (correspondingly trans-Planckian) physics due to the mesoscopic finite-$N$ effects, where $N$ is the number of bare particles in condensed matter (or correspondingly the number of the elements comprising the quantum vacuum). The finite-$N$ effects lead to mesoscopic fluctuations of the vacuum pressure. The amplitude of the mesoscopic flustuations of the Casimir force in a system with linear dimension $L$ is by the factor $N^{1/3}\sim L/ a_{P} $ larger than the traditional value of the Casimir force given by effective theory, where $a_{P}=\hbar/p_{ P}$ is the interatomic distance which plays the role of the Planck length.

PACS: 04.90.+e, 11.10.-z, 67.20.+k

Received: 14.03.2001

Language: English


 English version:
Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Letters, 2001, 73:8, 375–379

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