Vacuum fluctuations and generalized boundary conditions

Abstract

We present a study of the static and dynamical Casimir effects for a quantum field theory satisfying generalized Robin boundary conditions, of a kind that arises naturally within the context of quantum circuits. Since those conditions may also be relevant to measurements of the dynamical Casimir effect, we evaluate their role in the concrete example of a real scalar field in 1+1 dimensions, a system which has a well-known mechanical analogue involving a loaded string.