Casimir forces on deformed fermionic chains

Abstract: We characterize the Casimir forces for the Dirac vacuum on free-fermionic chains with smoothly varying hopping amplitudes, which correspond to (1+1)D curved spacetimes with a static metric in the continuum limit. The first-order energy potential for an obstacle on that lattice corresponds to the Newtonian potential associated to the metric, while the finite-size corrections are described by a curved extension of the conformal field theory predictions, including a suitable boundary term. We show that, for weak deformations of the Minkowski metric, Casimir forces measured by a local observer at the boundary are metric-independent. We provide numerical evidence for our results on a variety of (1+1)D deformations: Minkowski, Rindler, anti-de Sitter (the so-called rainbow system) and sinusoidal metrics.