Emerging translational variance: vacuum polarization energy of the \(\phi^6\) kink (Q2405459)

Summary: We propose an efficient method to compute the vacuum polarization energy of static field configurations that do not allow decomposition into symmetric and antisymmetric channels in one space dimension. In particular, we compute the vacuum polarization energy of the kink soliton in the \(\phi^6\) model. We link the dependence of this energy on the position of the center of the soliton to the different masses of the quantum fluctuations at negative and positive spatial infinity.