Scalar, spinor, and photon fields under relativistic cavity motion

Understand

We analyse quantised scalar, spinor and photon fields in a mechanically rigid cavity that is accelerated in Minkowski spacetime, in a recently-introduced perturbative small acceleration formalism that allows the velocities to become relativistic, with a view to applications in relativistic quantum information.

• A scalar field is analysed with both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, and a photon field under perfect conductor boundary conditions is shown to decompose into Dirichlet-like and Neumann-like polarisation modes.
• The Dirac spinor is analysed with a nonvanishing mass and with dimensions transverse to the acceleration, and the MIT bag boundary condition is shown to exclude zero modes.
• Unitarity of time evolution holds for smooth accelerations but fails for discontinuous accelerations in spacetime dimensions (3+1) and higher.