Thermal Casimir effect for Drude metals in the plane-sphere geometry

Antoine Canaguier-Durand (1) , Paulo A. Maia Neto (2) , Astrid Lambrecht (1) , Serge Reynaud (1)

1 LKB (Jussieu) - Laboratoire Kastler Brossel
2 IF / UFRJ - Instituto de Física da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

We compute the Casimir interaction between a plane and a sphere, the configuration employed in the most precise experiments. The scattering formula is developed by taking a suitably chosen plane-wave and multipole basis and is valid for arbitrary values of the sphere radius, inter-plate distance, temperature and arbitrary dielectric functions for both sphere and plate. Our analytical and numerical results for metallic surfaces show a non-trivial interplay between the effects of curvature, temperature, finite conductivity and dissipation.

Domaines: Physique Quantique [quant-ph]

Antoine Canaguier-Durand, Paulo A. Maia Neto, Astrid Lambrecht, Serge Reynaud. Thermal Casimir effect for Drude metals in the plane-sphere geometry. Physical Review A : Atomic, molecular, and optical physics [1990-2015], 2010, 82, pp.012511. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevA.82.012511⟩. ⟨hal-00486119⟩