Thermalized Vacuum and Vacuum Effects

Abstract: Some of the well-known effects regarding the vacuum are revisited under the formalism of the imaginary-time field theory. From these effects, they could imply the existence of one thermal vacuum in different circumstances. The imaginary-time hamiltonian of the vacuum is found to provide not only exact distribution functions in the calculations of the Casimir effect and the Van der Waals force but also cutoff functions. The thermal bath for the Unruh effect is constructed from the imaginary-time Green function. From the field theory in the curved space-time, field quantizations are defined according to different vacuum states and lead to the Hawking radiation; the introduced conformal invariance agree with the formalism of the imaginary-time field theory. The induced Green functions in the curved space-time are in accordance with those from the picture given from the thermal vacuum.