Fluctuations of energy density and validity of semiclassical gravity (Q1596278)

The authors study the fluctuations of the energy-momentum tensor \(T_{\mu\nu}\) of quantum fields in space-time. The following results for Minkowski and Casimir spaces are obtained: (1) the fluctuations of the energy density as well as its mean both increase with decreasing distance (or probing scale), and (2) the ratio of the variance of the fluctuations in energy-momentum tensor to its mean squared, i.e. \( \chi=(\langle \widehat\rho^2\rangle -\langle \widehat\rho\rangle ^2)/\langle \widehat\rho\rangle ^2,\) is of the order unity. It is shown that \(\chi\) being of the order unity does not imply a failure of semiclassical gravity based on the Einstein equation \(G_{\mu\nu}=8\pi G\langle \widehat T_{\mu\nu}\rangle \).