Dynamical Casimir effect instabilities

Abstract

The dynamic Casimir effect, which concerns two photon radiation processes due to time dependent frequency modulations, is computed in the one photon loop approximation. An instability is signaled by the production of an unphysically large number of photons. We show how it is tamed and a saturation in the number of photons reached through higher order processes. Explicit results are obtained for a recently proposed experiment. © 2006 The American Physical Society.