Novel Features of the Energy Momentum Tensor of a Casimir Apparatus in a Weak Gravitational Field

The influence of the gravity acceleration on the regularized energymomentum tensor of the quantized electromagnetic field between two plane parallel conducting plates is derived. A perturbative expansion, to first order in the constant acceleration parameter, of the Green functions involved and of the energy-momentum tensor is derived by means of the covariant geodesic point splitting procedure. The energy-momentum tensor is covariantly conserved and satisfies the expected relation between gauge-breaking and ghost parts. Interestingly, a non-vanishing trace anomaly is obtained to first order in the constant acceleration.