Köln 2004 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 6: Theory II
HK 6.4: Vortrag
Montag, 8. März 2004, 17:00–17:15, E
Fermionic Casimir Effect: Cavities Interact in the Fermi Sea — •Andreas Wirzba1 and Aurel Bulgac2 — 1Universität Bonn, HISKP(Theorie), Nussallee 14-16, 53115 Bonn — 2Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-1560, USA
We report about a new force that acts on cavities (literally empty regions of space) when they are immersed in a background of non-interacting fermionic matter fields. The interaction follows from the obstructions to the (quantum mechanical) motions of the fermions in the Fermi sea caused by the presence of bubbles or other (heavy) particles immersed in the latter, as e.g. nuclei in the neutron sea in the crust of a neutron star.
This effect resembles the traditional Casimir effect which describes the attraction between two parallel metallic mirrors in vacuum. Here, however, the fluctuating (bosonic) electromagnetic fields are replaced by real fermionic fields, the Casimir energy is inferred from the geometry-dependent part of the density of states, and its sign is not fixed, but varies according to the relative arrangement and distances of the cavities.
This topic is relevant to the physics of neutron star crusts (nuclei embedded in a neutron gas), to inhomogeneous phases in the quark-gluon plasma, to dilute Bose-Einstein-condensate bubbles inside the background of a Fermi-Dirac condensate, to buckyballs in liquid mercury, to superconducting droplets in a Fermi liquid, etc.
This work is supported under Contract 41445400 (COSY-067) of the Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH.