2024/08/30 by Jean Alexandre, Alexandre, Jean, Drew Backhouse +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum Mechanics and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.17189
openalex publication_date 2024/08/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Two fundamental signatures of Quantum Mechanics are tunnelling and the Casimir effect. We examine the ground state energetic properties of a scalar field confined on a D-dimensional sphere, and subjected to these two effects. We focus on D=2 and D=3, with a non-minimal coupling of a massless scalar field to curvature, which provides a radius-dependent effective mass. This scenario allows tunnelling to be more important than the Casimir effect, in a certain regime of parameters, and potential implications in Early Cosmology are discussed for the case D=3, which could avoid a cosmological singularity.