As I understand it, the dynamical Casimir effect has been demonstrated in the laboratory and has been found to allow the emission of photons from the vacuum. Given the right frequency of the oscillating mirror, and the right energy supplied to the experiment, could one potentially produce fermions such as a proton or neutron? Do protons/positrons get created as virtual particle pairs in the zero point energy fluctuations, or only bosons?
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It is confusing to think of vacuum as "no energy there". When real photons are produced, i.e with a four vector that can be measured in the lab, this means the energy has been supplied . This means that the mathematically assumed vacuum in the model for the experiment has an energy density that can produce the photons.
If the energy density of the vacuum is enough for the production of a pair of fermions there is no reason why this cannot happen. A pair of fermions has to be produced because of quantum number conservation laws: a vacuum may have energy in the mathematical formulation, but no quantum numbers.
As one needs 0.551MeV for each, electron and positron, this cannot happen in the Casimir experiment. The vacuum energy density is supplied by the solid state electromagnetic energies which are of much smaller energy, as the experiment found microwave radiation ( order ~$10^{-5}$ electron volts).
anna v
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