Casimir force acting on bodies in media: Why textbooks are wrong

This article is divided in three sections. In the first section we briefly review some high precision experiments on the Casimir force, underlying an important aspect of the analysis of the data. In the second section we discuss our recent results in the measurement of the Casimir force using non-trivial materials. In the third section we present some original ideas for experiments on new phenomena related to the Casimir effects.

Contribution to the Seminaire Poincare, 2002

The Casimir effect is a crucial prediction of Quantum Field Theory which has fascinating connections with open questions in fundamental physics. The ideal formula written by Casimir does not describe real experiments and it has to be generalized by taking into account the effects of imperfect reflection, thermal fluctuations, geometry as well as the corrections coming from surface physics. We discuss these developments in Casimir physics and give the current status in the com...

The Casimir effect, a key observable realization of vacuum fluctuations, is usually taught in graduate courses on quantum field theory. The growing importance of Casimir forces in microelectromechanical systems motivates this subject as a topic for graduate many-body physics courses. To this end, we revisit the Casimir effect using methods common in condensed matter physics. We recover previously derived results and explore the implications of the analogies implicit in this t...

Zero-point fluctuations in quantum fields give rise to observable forces between material bodies, the so-called Casimir forces. In these lectures I present the theory of the Casimir effect, primarily formulated in terms of Green's functions. There is an intimate relation between the Casimir effect and van der Waals forces. Applications to conductors and dielectric bodies of various shapes will be given for the cases of scalar, electromagnetic, and fermionic fields. The dimens...

The Casimir force provides a striking example of the effects of quantum fluctuations in a mesoscopic system. Because it arises from the objects' electromagnetic response, the necessary calculations in quantum field theory are most naturally expressed in terms of electromagnetic scattering from each object. In this review we illustrate a variety of such techniques, with a focus on those that can be expressed in terms of surface effects, including both idealized boundary condit...

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 (standar...

We propose a new approach to the Casimir effect based on classical ray optics. We define and compute the contribution of classical optical paths to the Casimir force between rigid bodies. Our approach improves upon the proximity force approximation. It can be generalized easily to arbitrary geometries, different boundary conditions, to the computation of Casimir energy densities and to many other situations. This is a brief introduction to the method. Joint work with R.L.Jaff...

Zero-point fluctuations in quantum fields give rise to observable forces between material bodies, the so-called Casimir forces. In this lecture I present some results of the theory of the Casimir effect, primarily formulated in terms of Green's functions. There is an intimate relation between the Casimir effect and van der Waals forces. Applications to conductors and dielectric bodies of various shapes will be given for the cases of scalar, electromagnetic, and fermionic fiel...

We give a comprehensive presentation of methods for calculating the Casimir force to arbitrary accuracy, for any number of objects, arbitrary shapes, susceptibility functions, and separations. The technique is applicable to objects immersed in media other than vacuum, to nonzero temperatures, and to spatial arrangements in which one object is enclosed in another. Our method combines each object's classical electromagnetic scattering amplitude with universal translation matric...