Dynamical Casimir effect for semitransparent mirrors

Abstract

We study the dynamical Casimir effect resulting from the oscillatory motion of either one or two flat semitransparent mirrors, coupled to a quantum real and massless scalar field. Our approach is based on a perturbative evaluation, in the coupling between mirrors and field, of the corresponding effective action, which is used to compute the particle creation rate. The amplitude of the oscillation is not necessarily small. We first obtain results for a single mirror, both for nonrelativistic and for relativistic motions, showing that only for the latter may the effects be significant. For two mirrors, on the other hand, we show that there are interesting interference effects, and that in some particular cases the results differ from those obtained assuming small amplitudes, already for nonrelativistic motions.