Speaker
Glenn Barnich
Description
The semiclassical contribution to the partition function is obtained by evaluating the Euclidean action improved through suitable boundary terms. We address the question of which degrees of freedom are responsible for this contribution. A physical toy model for the gravitational problem is a charged vacuum capacitor. For a planar charged vacuum capacitor with perfectly conducting plates, we identify the degrees of freedom that, in the quantum theory, give rise to additional contributions to the standard black body result proportional to the area of the plates. They allow for a microscopic derivation of the thermodynamics of the charged capacitor and contribute to the Casimir effect at finite temperature and thus to the entropy.
