Casimir effect for a scalar field via Krein quantization

•A modification of QFT is considered to address the vacuum energy divergence problem.•Casimir energy of a spherical shell is calculated, through this approach.•In this technique, it is shown, the theory is automatically regularized.

In this work, we present a rather simple method to study the Casimir effect on a spherical shell for a massless scalar field with Dirichlet boundary condition by applying the indefinite metric field (Krein) quantization technique. In this technique, the field operators are constructed from both negative and positive norm states. Having understood that negative norm states are un-physical, they are only used as a mathematical tool for renormalizing the theory and then one can get rid of them by imposing some proper physical conditions.