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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Tunneling and the Casimir effect on a D-dimensional sphere

Jean Alexandre and Drew Backhouse

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Phys. Rev. D 110, L121703 – Published 27 December, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.110.L121703

Abstract

Two fundamental signatures of quantum field theory are tunneling and the Casimir effect. We examine the ground state energetic properties of a scalar field confined on a D-dimensional sphere and subjected to these two effects. We focus on D=2 and D=3, with a negative coupling of a massless scalar field to curvature, providing a radius-dependent effective mass that triggers symmetry breaking. This scenario allows tunneling to be more important than the Casimir effect, in a certain regime of parameters, and potential implications in early cosmology are discussed for the case D=3, which could avoid a cosmological singularity.

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Phys. Rev. D 110, L121703– Published 27 December, 2024
  • Received 9 September 2024
  • Accepted 20 November 2024
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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