Stueckelberg massive electromagnetism in curved spacetime: Hadamard renormalization of the stress-energy tensor and the Casimir effect

We discuss Stueckelberg massive electromagnetism on an arbitrary four-dimensional curved spacetime and, in particular, (i) the gauge invariance of the classical theory and its covariant quantization; (ii) the wave equations for the massive spin-1 field A(mu), for the auxiliary Stueckelberg scalar field Phi and for the ghost fields C and C*; (iii) Ward identities; (iv) the Hadamard representation of the various Feynman propagators and the covariant Taylor series expansions of the corresponding coefficients. This permits us to construct, for a Hadamard quantum state, the expectation value of the renormalized stress-energy tensor associated with the Stueckelberg theory. We provide two alternative but equivalent expressions for this result. The first one is obtained by removing the contribution of the "Stueckelberg ghost" Phi and only involves state-dependent and geometrical quantities associated with the massive vector field A(mu). The other one involves contributions coming from both the massive vector field and the auxiliary Stueckelberg scalar field, and it has been constructed in such a way that, in the zero-mass limit, the massive vector field contribution reduces smoothly to the result obtained from Maxwell's theory. As an application of our results, we consider the Casimir effect outside a perfectly conducting medium with a plane boundary. We discuss the results obtained using Stueckelberg but also de Broglie-Proca electromagnetism, and we consider the zero-mass limit of the vacuum energy in both theories. We finally compare the de Broglie-Proca and Stueckelberg formalisms and highlight the advantages of the Stueckelberg point of view, even if, in our opinion, the de Broglie-Proca and Stueckelberg approaches of massive electromagnetism are two faces of the same field theory.