Casimir (vacuum) energy in planar QED with strong coupling

Abstract

The essentially non-perturbative vacuum polarization effects, caused by an extended external supercritical Coulomb source, are explored for a planar Dirac-Coulomb (DC) system with strong coupling (similar to graphene and graphene-based heterostructures). Taking account of results, obtained in \cite{partI2018} for the induced charge density $\rho_{VP}(\vec{r})$, in the present paper the evaluation of the Casimir (vacuum) energy $\mathcal{E}_{VP}$ is presented. The main result is that for a wide range of the system parameters in the overcritical region $\mathcal{E}_{VP}$ turns out to be a rapidly decreasing negative function $\sim - Z^3/R_0\, $ with $Z\, , R_0$ being the charge and the size of the external source. By an explicit calculation the possibility for complete screening of the electrostatic reflection self-energy of the external source by such polarization effects for $Z \gg Z_{cr,1}$ is demonstrated. The dependence of the Casimir energy on the screening of the Coulomb asymptotics of the external source at some $R_1>R_0$ is also explored in detail, and some peculiar effects in the partial channels with the lowest rotational numbers $m_j=\pm 1/2\, , \pm3/2$ in the screened case are also discussed.