Comment on the sign of the Casimir force

Abstract

I show that reflection positivity implies that the force between any mirror pair of charge-conjugate probes of the quantum vacuum is attractive. This generalizes a recent theorem of Kenneth and Klich to interacting quantum fields, to arbitrary semiclassical bodies, and to quantized probes with non-overlapping wavefunctions. I also prove that the torques on charge-conjugate probes tend always to rotate them into a mirror-symmetric position.

13 pages, 1 figure, Latex file. Several points clarified and expanded, two references added.

References in corpus (1)

• Casimir force on a piston

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Crossover from Attractive to Repulsive Casimir Forces and Vice Versa
• Vacuum Stress and Closed Paths in Rectangles, Pistons, and Pistols
• Cancellation of nonrenormalizable hypersurface divergences and the d-dimensional Casimir piston
• Casimir force in O(n) lattice models with a diffuse interface