New vacuum boundary effects of massive field theories

Abstract: Analytical arguments suggest that the Casimir energy in 2+1 dimensions for gauge theories exponentially decays with the distance between the boundaries. The phenomenon has also been observed by non-perturbative numerical simulations. The dependence of this exponential decay on the different boundary conditions could help to better understand the infrared behavior of these theories and in particular their mass spectrum. A similar behavior is expected in 3+1 dimensions. Motivated by this feature we analyze the dependence of the exponential decay of Casimir energy for different boundary conditions of massive scalar fields in 3+1 dimensional spacetimes. We show that the boundary conditions classify in two different families according on the rate of this exponential decay of the Casimir energy. If the boundary conditions on each boundary are independent (e.g. both boundaries satisfy Dirichlet boundary conditions), the Casimir energy has a exponential decay that is two times faster than when the boundary conditions interconnect the two boundary plates (e.g. for periodic or antiperiodic boundary conditions). These results will be useful for a comparison with the Casimir energy in the non-perturbative regime of non-Abelian gauge theories.