2001/06/30 by Thorsten Emig, Andreas Hanke, Ramin Golestanian +1 · 9 citations
Engineering · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Casimir effect #Casimir pressure #Classical mechanics #Condensed matter physics #Dirac delta function #Geometry #Lambda #Mathematics #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Path integral formulation #Physics #Quantization (signal processing) #Quantum #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum mechanics #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #cond-mat.stat-mech #hep-th #quant-ph #van der Waals force
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.87.260402
published as Phys.Rev.Lett. 87 (2001) 260402 · 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters
arxiv created 2001/11/08 · openalex publication_date 2001/12/06 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study the geometry dependence of the Casimir energy for deformed metal plates by a path integral quantization of the electromagnetic field. For the first time, we give a complete analytical result for the deformation induced change in Casimir energy \ensuremathδE in an experimentally testable, nontrivial geometry, consisting of a flat and a corrugated plate. Our results show an interesting crossover for \ensuremathδE as a function of the ratio of the mean plate distance H, to the corrugation length \ensuremathλ: For \ensuremathλ\ensuremath≪H we find a slower decay \ensuremath∼H^\ensuremath-4, compared to the H^\ensuremath-5 behavior predicted by the commonly used pairwise summation of van der Waals forces, which is valid only for \ensuremathλ\ensuremath≫H.