Nonequilibrium dynamics of moving mirrors in quantum fields: Influence functional and the Langevin equation

We employ the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism to study the nonequilibrium dynamics of the mirror with perfect reflection moving in a quantum field. In the case where the mirror undergoes the small displacement, the coarse-grained effective action is obtained by integrating out the quantum field with the method of influence functional. The semiclassical Langevin equation is derived, and is found to involve two levels of backreaction effects on the dynamics of mirrors: radiation reaction induced by the motion of the mirror and backreaction dissipation arising from fluctuations in quantum field via a fluctuation-dissipation relation. Although the corresponding theorem of fluctuation and dissipation for the case with the small mirror's displacement is of model independence, the study from the first principles derivation shows that the theorem is also independent of the regulators introduced to deal with short-distance divergences from the quantum field. Thus, when the method of regularization is introduced to compute the dissipation and fluctuation effects, this theorem must be fulfilled as the results are obtained by taking the short-distance limit in the end of calculations. The backreaction effects from vacuum fluctuations on moving mirrors are found to be hardly detected while those effects from thermal fluctuations may be detectable