The Lima-Vanzella gravity-induced vacuum dominance effect

Full text: We review the LIMA-VANZELLA gravity-induced vacuum dominance effect, which leads, e.g., to an exponentially fast increase of the vacuum energy density of some free scalar fields in the spacetime of dense enough neutron stars. Once the effect is triggered, the energy density of the star would be overwhelmed by the vacuum energy density in few milliseconds possibly leading to a 'catastrophic' event. Furthermore, the vacuum fluctuations built up during the unstable epoch are expected to lead eventually to a particle burst. We emphasize that such particle creation will occur even in the adiabatic limit, and therefore is quite distinct from the usual particle creation due to the change in the background geometry. The amount of created particles mostly depends on the duration of the unstable epoch and final stationary configuration, which are open issues at this point. Finally, we establish a connection between this quantum effect and the classical instability identified by quasi-normal mode analyses. (author)