The Casimir effect: some aspects

Abstract

We start this paper with a historical survey of the Casimir effect, showing that its origin is related to experiments on colloidal chemistry. We present two methods of computing Casimir forces, namely: the global method introduced by Casimir, based on the idea of zero-point energy of the quantum electromagnetic field, and a local one, which requires the computation of the energy-momentum stress tensor of the corresponding field.As explicit examples, we calculate the (standard) Casimir forces between two parallel and perfectly conducting plates and discuss the more involved problem of a scalar field submitted to Robin boundary conditions at two parallel plates. A few comments are made about recent experiments that undoubtedly confirm the existence of this effect. Finally, we briefly discuss a few topics which are either elaborations of the Casimir effect or topics that are related in some way to this effect as, for example, the influence of a magnetic field on the Casimir effect of charged fields, magnetic properties of a confined vacuum and radiation reaction forces on non-relativistic moving boundaries.

Attractive and repulsive Casimir vacuum energy with general boundary conditions

“…r , thus one has to proceed numerically from expression (3.1). The Casimir energy for Robin boundary conditions is displayed in Figure 2 which is in agreement with previous analyses [52,53]. Of note is that c ix) Pauli matrices boundary conditions.…”

Fifty Years of the Dynamical Casimir Effect

“…Therefore, the DCE can be considered as the specific subfield of a much bigger physical area, known nowadays under the name Casimir Physics. This whole area is outside the present study, so that we give only a few references to the relevant reviews and books [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

Casimir-Polder interactions with massive photons: Implications for BSM physics

“…routinely used in the literature of unaprticle phenomenology. But it is well known that the Casimir energy E C between two parallel plates (and in general between two given surfaces of arbitrary geometrical shape) [1,62] can be related to a pairwise integration of the Casimir-Polder interaction U (r 1 − r 2 ):…”