Scalar cylinder-plate and cylinder-cylinder Casimir interaction in higher dimensional spacetime

Abstract

We study the cylinder-plate and the cylinder-cylinder Casimir interaction in the (D + 1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime due to the vacuum fluctuations of massless scalar fields. Different combinations of Dirichlet (D) and Neumann (N) boundary conditions are imposed on the two interacting objects. For the cylinder-cylinder interaction, we consider the case where one cylinder is inside the other, and the case where the two cylinders are outside each other. By computing the transition matrices of the objects and the translation matrices that relate different coordinate systems, the explicit formulas for the Casimir interaction energies are derived. From these formulas, we compute the large separation and small separation asymptotic behaviors of the Casimir interaction. For the cylinder-plate interaction with R ≪ L, where R is the radius of the cylinder and L is the distance from the center of the cylinder to the plate, the order of decay of the Casimir interaction only depends on the boundary conditions imposed on the cylinder. The orders are L −D+1 / ln(L) and L −D−1 / ln L respectively for Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions on the cylinder. For two cylinders with radii R1 and R2 lying parallelly outside each other, the orders of decay of therespectively for DD, DN/ND and NN boundary conditions, where L is the distance between the centers of the cylinders. The more interesting and important characteristic of Casimir interaction appears at small separation. Using perturbation technique, we compute the small separation asymptotic expansions of the Casimir interaction energies up to the next-to-leading order terms. The leading terms coincide with the respective results obtained using proximity force approximation, which is of order d −D+1/2 , where d is the distance between the two objects. The results on the next-toleading order terms are more interesting and important. We find some universal behaviors. It is also noticed that for the case of Dirichlet-Dirichlet cylinder-plate interaction, the next-to-leading order term agrees with that obtained using derivative expansion. Hence, based on our results on other boundary conditions and on the cylinder-cylinder interaction, we postulate a formula for the derivative expansion to expand the Casimir interaction energy up to the next-to-leading order terms for DD, DN, ND and NN boundary conditions, for the interaction between two curved surfaces in (D + 1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. It is found that the postulate agrees with our previous results on the sphere-sphere interactions except when D = 4.