Self-adjointness and the Casimir effect with confined quantized spinor matter

Abstract: A generalization of the MIT bag boundary condition for spinor matter is proposed basing on the requirement that the Dirac hamiltonian operator be self-adjoint. An influence of a background magnetic field on the vacuum of charged spinor matter confined between two parallel material plates is studied. Employing the most general set of boundary conditions at the plates in the case of the uniform magnetic field directed orthogonally to the plates, we find the pressure from the vacuum onto the plates. In physically plausible situations, the Casimir effect is shown to be repulsive, independently of a choice of boundary conditions and of a distance between the plates.