2022/03/27 by Daniel J. M. Hodgson, Christopher Burgess, Hodgson, Daniel +7
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Spanish Philosophy and Literature
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.14385
openalex publication_date 2022/03/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 coordinates equivalently, this paper overcomes no-go theorems of quantum electrodynamics and obtains a local relativistic quantum description of the electromagnetic field in free space. When extended to cavities, our approach can be used to calculate Casimir forces directly in position space without the introduction of cut-off frequencies.