Something Can Come of Nothing: Surface Approaches to Quantum Fluctuations and the Casimir Force

Giuseppe Bimonte; Thorsten Emig; Noah Graham; Mehran Kardar

doi:10.1146/annurev-nucl-111119-012402

Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science

Volume 72, 2022

Review Article

Open Access

Something Can Come of Nothing: Surface Approaches to Quantum Fluctuations and the Casimir Force

Giuseppe Bimonte^1,2, Thorsten Emig³, Noah Graham⁴, and Mehran Kardar⁵
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Affiliations: ¹Dipartimento di Fisica “Ettore Pancini,” Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Complesso Universitario di Monte Sant'Angelo, Napoli, Italy ²INFN Sezione di Napoli, Napoli, Italy ³Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques, CNRS UMR 8626, Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France ⁴Department of Physics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, USA; email: [email protected] ⁵Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Vol. 72:93-118 (Volume publication date September 2022) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-nucl-111119-012402
First published as a Review in Advance on July 05, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by Annual Reviews.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information

Abstract

The Casimir force provides a striking example of the effects of quantum fluctuations in a mesoscopic system. Because it arises from the objects’ electromagnetic response, the necessary calculations in quantum field theory are most naturally expressed in terms of electromagnetic scattering from each object. In this review, we illustrate a variety of such techniques, with a focus on those that can be expressed in terms of surface effects, including both idealized boundary conditions and their physical realization in terms of material properties.

Keyword(s): Casimir forces, fluctuation-induced interactions, path integral, scattering matrix, stress tensor

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Something Can Come of Nothing: Surface Approaches to Quantum Fluctuations and the Casimir Force

Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science 72, 93 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-nucl-111119-012402

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Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science

Volume 72, 2022

Review Article

Open Access

Something Can Come of Nothing: Surface Approaches to Quantum Fluctuations and the Casimir Force

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