1998/10/09 by Iver Brevik, Valery N. Marachevsky, V. N. Marachevsky +1 · 3 citations
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Biofield Effects and Biophysics #Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #hep-th #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.82.3948
published as Phys.Rev.Lett.82:3948-3951,1999 · 7 pages, no figures, REVTeX
arxiv created 1998/10/09 · openalex publication_date 1999/05/17 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We show that the Casimir, or zero-point, energy of a dilute dielectric ball, or of a spherical bubble in a dielectric medium, coincides with the sum of the van der Waals energies between the molecules that make up the medium. That energy, which is finite and repulsive when self-energy and surface effects are removed, may be unambiguously calculated by either dimensional continuation or by zeta-function regularization. This physical interpretation of the Casimir energy seems to be unambiguous evidence that the bulk self-energy cannot be relevant to sonoluminescence.