Vacuum excitation by sudden appearance and disappearance of a Dirichlet wall in a cavity

Abstract

Vacuum excitation by time-varying boundary conditions is not only of fundamental importance but also has recently been confirmed in a laboratory experiment. In this paper, we study the vacuum excitation of a scalar field by the instantaneous appearance and disappearance of a both-sided Dirichlet wall in the middle of a 1D cavity, as toy models of bifurcating and merging spacetimes, respectively. It is shown that the energy flux emitted positively diverges on the null lines emanating from the appearance and disappearance events, which is analogous to the result of Anderson and DeWitt. This result suggests that the semiclassical effect prevents the spacetime both from bifurcating and merging. In addition, we argue that the diverging flux in the disappearance case plays an interesting role to compensate for the lowness of ambient energy density after the disappearance, which is lower than the zero-point level.