Correction to the Casimir Force due to Anomalous Skin Effect
Abstract
The Casimir force [1] between uncharged metallic plates, predicted in 1948 as a quantum electrodynamics effect, has recently become a subject of systematic experimental investigation. The reason is that nowadays a reliable control of the separations between bodies smaller than 1 μ m is possible with the development of microtechnologies [2,3]. To draw any conclusion from the experiments one has to predict the force theoretically with a precision comparable with experimental errors. This involves a precise characterization of the optical properties of the materials that is not always an easy task. In this work, we present an exact calculation of the Casimir force between two metallic slabs in the frequency region of the anomalous skin effect . The optical response of the metals is described by a nonlocal dielectric function and the Casimir force is calculated within a surface impedance approach. In particular, we calculate the Casimir force using gold and show that the corrections due to nonlocality are important and are comparable to the precision achieved in current experiments. [1] H. B. G. Casimir, Proc. K. Ned. Akad. Wet. 51, 793 (1948). [2] H. B. Chan, V. A. Aksyuk, R. N. Kleiman, D. J. Bishop, and F. Capasso, Science 291, 1941 (2001). [3] R. S. Decca, D. López, E. Fischbach, and D. E. Krause, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 050402 (2003).
- Publication:
-
APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 2004
- Bibcode:
- 2004APS..MARY38007E