Attractive Electromagnetic Casimir Stress on a Spherical Dielectric Shell

Abstract

Based on calculations involving an idealized boundary condition, it has long been assumed that the stress on a spherical conducting shell is repulsive. We use the more realistic case of a Drude dielectric to show that the stress is attractive, matching the generic behavior of Casimir forces in electromagnetism. We trace the discrepancy between these two cases to interactions between the electromagnetic quantum fluctuations and the dielectric material.

Five pages, one figure, pdflatex, matches version to be pusblished in Phys Lett B

References in corpus (3)

• On the vacuum energy of a spherical plasma shell
• Quantum stabilization of Z-strings, a status report on D=3+1 dimensions
• Scalar Casimir Energies of Tetrahedra and Prisms

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• Something Can Come of Nothing: Surface Approaches to Quantum Fluctuations and the Casimir Force
• How modes shape Casimir Physics
• On the Casimir Energy of Frequency Dependent Interactions