Bubble-wall Casimir interaction in fermionic environments

Abstract

We consider the Casimir interaction, mediated by massless fermions, between a spherical defect and a flat potential barrier, assuming hard (bag-type) boundary conditions at both the barrier and the surface of the sphere. The computation of the quantum interaction energy is carried out using the multiple scattering approach, adapted here to the setup in question. We find an exact integral formula for the energy, from which we extract both the large and short distance asymptotic behaviour. At large distance the fermionic contribution is found to scale as $L^{-3}$, in contrast to that of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations that, assuming perfectly conducting boundaries, scales as $L^{-4}$. At short distance, we compute the leading and sub-leading contribution to the vacuum energy. The leading one coincides with what it is expected from the proximity force approximation, while the sub-leading term gives, contrary to the electromagnetic case, a positive correction to the proximity force result.