General information
The dependence of properties of the vacuum state on the geometry of background space-time is among the most interesting directions of investigations in quantum field theory. The project aims to investigate the combined effects of spatial topology, curvature and boundaries on the local physical characteristics of the scalar, fermionic and electromagnetic vacua. Three different classes of the local background geometries will be discussed: Rindler space-time, de Sitter and anti-de Sitter space-times and Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmological models. A toroidal compactification of a part of spatial dimensions will be discussed. In a part of problems the presence of planar boundaries will be assumed. The nontrivial topology and the boundaries give rise to topological and boundary-induced Casimir effects for physical observables. As such, the expectation values of the field squared, fermion condensate, energy-momentum tensor and the current density for charged fields will be investigated. Applications will be discussed in inflationary models, in barneworld scenario and in the physics of cylindrical black holes.
