Dynamical Casimir effect for fermions in 2+1 dimensions

Abstract

We study the fermion pair creation phenomenon due to the time dependence of curves, where boundary conditions are imposed on a Dirac field in 2+1 dimensions. These conditions, which lead to non-trivial relations for the normal component of the fermionic current, depend on the value of a dimensionless parameter. We show that the pair creation effect is maximized for bag boundary conditions, obtained for a particular value of that parameter. The effect is studied in terms of the effective action to extract information on the probability of vacuum decay, using an expansion in powers of the deformation of the curves with respect to straight lines. We demonstrate that the first non-trivial contributions to this process can be obtained from the electromagnetic vacuum polarization tensor for a Dirac field coupled to static boundaries.