A generalized bag-like boundary condition for fields with arbitrary spin

Abstract

Boundary conditions (BCs) for the Maxwell and Dirac fields at material surfaces are widely-used and physically well-motivated, but do not appear to have been generalized to deal with higher spin fields. As a result there is no clear prescription as to which BCs should be selected in order to obtain physically-relevant results pertaining to confined higher spin fields. This lack of understanding is significant given that boundary-dependent phenomena are ubiquitous across physics, a prominent example being the Casimir effect. Here, we use the two-spinor calculus formalism to present a unified treatment of BCs routinely employed in the treatment of spin- $1/2$ and spin-1 fields. We then use this unification to obtain a BC that can be applied to massless fields of any spin, including the spin-2 graviton, and its supersymmetric partner the spin- $3/2$ gravitino.

Keywords

• Casimir effect
• spinor fields
• bag model
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