Electromagnetic field fluctuations near a dielectric-vacuum boundary and surface divergences in the ideal conductor limit

Abstract

We consider the electric and magnetic field fluctuations in the vacuum state in the region external to a half-space filled with a homogeneous non-dissipative dielectric. We discuss an appropriate limit to an ideal metal and concentrate our interest on the renormalized field fluctuations, or equivalently to renormalized electric and magnetic energy densities, in the proximity of the dielectric-vacuum interface. We show that surface divergences of field fluctuations arise at the interface in an appropriate ideal conductor limit, and that our limiting procedure allows to discuss in detail their structure. Field fluctuations close to the surface can be investigated through the retarded Casimir-Polder interaction with an appropriate polarizable body.

6 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Field fluctuations near a conducting plate and Casimir-Polder forces in the presence of boundary conditions
• Casimir-Polder interatomic potential between two atoms at finite temperature and in the presence of boundary conditions
• Casimir-Polder forces, boundary conditions and fluctuations
• Boundary divergences in vacuum self-energies and quantum field theory in curved spacetime

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• Effect of boundaries on vacuum field fluctuations and radiation-mediated interactions between atoms
• Electromagnetic Casimir densities for a cylindrical shell on de Sitter space
• Local thermal behaviour of a massive scalar field near a reflecting wall
• Time-dependent resonance interaction energy between two entangled atoms under non-equilibrium conditions
• Thermodynamics of the scalar radiation in the presence of a reflecting plane wall