ZERO-POINT NOISE IN A NONSTATIONARY DIELECTRIC CAVITY

The vacuum field in a dielectric cavity where the medium has a rapidly changing time-dependent refractive index exhibits nonclassical featur es that are directly related to the distortion of the vacuum fluctuati ons of the field. For appropriate parameters, these nonclassical effec ts are appreciable enough that a suitable measure of the change in the zero-point noise of the cavity field could provide a way to probe dis tortions of the vacuum fluctuations.