SCHWINGERS METHOD FOR THE FERMIONIC CASIMIR EFFECT AT FINITE-TEMPERATURE

The Casimir energy of a massive Dirac field at finite temperature and confined between two parallel infinite plates is computed using a meth od proposed by Schwinger. The boundary conditions are those of zero cu rrent through the plates, as inspired by quark confinement in the MIT bag model for hadrons. We use Schwinger's original regularization by a cutoff in proper-time. We comment on the analytical continuation meth od of regularization, which allows the employment of Epstein function techniques, and on the different possible expressions for the final an swer.