  We analyze the introduction of dissipative effects in the study of the
dynamical Casimir effect. We consider a toy model for an electromagnetic cavity
that contains a semiconducting thin shell, which is irradiated with short laser
pulses in order to produce periodic oscillations of its conductivity. The
coupling between the quantum field in the cavity and the microscopic degrees of
freedom of the shell induces dissipation and noise in the dynamics of the
field. We argue that the photon creation process should be described in terms
of a damped oscillator with nonlocal dissipation and colored noise.
