2011/12/31 by Giuseppe Bimonte, G. Bimonte, Thorsten Emig +3 · 102 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Casimir effect #Casimir pressure #Classical mechanics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Materials science #Mechanics #Physics #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.3686903
published in Applied Physics Letters 100(7) (American Institute of Physics) · 4 pages, 2 figures
openalex publication_date 2012/02/13 · arxiv created 2012/02/21 · arxiv updated 2015/06/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
A widely used method for estimating Casimir interactions [H. B. G. Casimir, Proc. K. Ned. Akad. Wet. 51, 793 (1948)] between gently curved material surfaces at short distances is the proximity force approximation (PFA). While this approximation is asymptotically exact at vanishing separations, quantifying corrections to PFA has been notoriously difficult. Here, we use a derivative expansion to compute the leading curvature correction to PFA for metals (gold) at room temperature. We derive an explicit expression for the amplitude θ̂1 of the PFA correction to the force gradient for axially symmetric surfaces. In the non-retarded limit, the corrections to the Casimir free energy are found to scale logarithmically with distance. For gold, θ̂1 has an unusually large temperature dependence.