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

The Casimir effect, which predicts the emergence of an attractive force between two parallel, highly reflecting plates in vacuum, plays a vital role in various fields of physics, from quantum field theory and cosmology to nanophotonics and condensed matter physics. Nevertheless, Casimir forces still lack an intuitive explanation and current derivations rely on regularisation procedures to remove infinities. Starting from special relativity and treating space and time coordina...

We comment on a recently published measurement of the Casimir force for distances in the 0.6 to 6 micrometer range between two Au surfaces (Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 5(1997)) and the net discrepancy reported for the comparison with theoretical predictions (Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 5475 (1998)).

It is pointed out that the Casimir energy in a medium can be obtained most directly from the zero-point energy of the electromagnetic field because of its reduced propagation velocity. This brings to the fore again the old problem related to how the principle of relativity is combined with the Maxwell field equations in a continuous medium.

In a recent paper [C. Raabe and D.-G. Welsch, Phys. Rev. A 71, 013814 (2005)] an electromagnetic energy-momentum tensor is suggested as an alternative to the Abraham-Minkowski tensor and is applied to calculations of Casimir forces in planar geometries. We argue that the universality of the suggested tensor is doubtful; application of the Raabe-Welsch theory to a simple example in classical electrodynamics shows that their proposed tensor is unable to describe the situation i...

The physical origin of the Casimir force is connected with the existence of zero-point and thermal fluctuations. The Casimir effect is very general and finds applications in various fields of physics. This review is limited to the rapid progress at the intersection of experiment and theory that has been achieved in the last few years. It includes a critical assessment of the proposed approaches to the resolution of the puzzles arising in the applications of the Lifshitz theor...

The properties of fluctuation induced interactions like van der Waals and Casimir-Lifshitz forces are of interest in a plethora of fields ranging from biophysics to nanotechnology. Here we describe a general approach to compute these interactions. It is based on a combination of methods from statistical physics and scattering theory. We showcase how it is exquisitely suited to analyze a variety of previously unexplored phenomena. Examples are given to show how the interplay o...

It has been argued since 1948, when it was experimentally demonstrated, that the Casimir effect-where two non-charged conducting plates have a weak but measurable force on each other dependent on the inverse fourth power of the distance between them-shows the reality of vacuum zero-point fluctuations. This "proof" of the reality of vacuum fluctuations has been repeated in many quantum field theory books and papers subsequent to 1948. The attractive force is generally ascribed...

A new concise method is presented for the calculation of the ground-state energy of the electromagnetic field and matter field interacting system. With the assumption of squeezed-like state, a new vacuum state is obtained for the interacting system. The energy of the new vacuum state is lower than that given by the second-order perturbation theory in existing theories. In our theory, the Casimir effect is attributed neither to the quantum fluctuation in the zero-point energy ...

The attractive force between metallic surfaces, predicted by Casimir in 1948, seems to indicate the physical existence and measurability of the quantized electromagnetic field's zero-point energy. It is shown in this article, that the measurements of that force do not confirm Casimir's model, but in fact disprove it's foundational assumption that metal plates may be represented in the theory by quantum-field-theoretical boundaries. The consequences for the cosmological consta...

We give a short review on the static and dynamical Casimir effects, recalling their historical prediction, as well as their more recent experimental verification. We emphasise on the central role played by so-called {\it dynamical boundary conditions} (for which the boundary condition depends on a second time derivative of the field) in the experimental verification of the dynamical Casimir effect by Wilson et al. We then go on to review our previous work on the static Casimi...