Casimir energy for spherical shell in Schwarzschild black hole background (Q1424866)

The black hole physics is a field of tremendous significance and much work is being devoted to understand and unravel some of the mysteries in and around the black hole itself. The Casimir effect is one of the most interesting manifestations of the nontrivial properties of the vacuum state in quantum field theory. In the paper under review the authors have investigated the Casimir energy of the massless scalar field for a spherical shell with Dirichlet boundary conditions. In the second section the Casimir energy is reviewed in terms of the Zeta function. This is followed by the study of the heat kernel coefficients for the massless scalar field inside and outside of the spherical shell. The divergent parts of the Casimir energy in and out of the shell are separately worked out. There are 42 equations and 40 references. It is shown that the existence of the horizon and barrier with effective potential is sufficient to compel the black hole to emit black-body radiation with temperatures that exactly coincides with the standard result for the well-known Hawking radiation. A procedure similar to that of the bag model for renormalization is used.