Dynamical Casimir effect in the worldline formulation

Abstract

We evaluate the effective action for the Dynamical Casimir Effect (DCE) for a real scalar field in d+1 dimensions within the worldline formulation of quantum field theory. The scalar field is coupled to a spacetime-dependent mass term, which here plays the role of the moving medium and imposes imperfect boundary conditions on time-dependent surfaces. Expanding in powers of the departure of the geometry from a planar configuration, the worldline path integral factorizes into simpler, lower-dimensional ones. In the limit of a strong coupling to the surface, we recover the Dirichlet result and derive the systematic corrections in inverse powers of the coupling. Finally, we also apply the method to a two-surface configuration.