Casimir effect in conformally flat spacetimes

Abstract

We discuss several approaches to determine the Casimir force in inertial frames of reference in different dimensions. On an example of a simple model involving mirrors in Rindler spacetime we show that Casimir’s and Lifschitz’s methods are inequivalent and only the latter provides the correct force in other spacetime geometries. For conformally coupled fields we derive the Casimir force in conformally flat spacetimes utilizing an anomaly and provide explicit examples in the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (k = 0) models.