Casimir pressure in a multilayer system with a fixed total length

Journal Article · Sun Aug 15 04:00:00 EDT 2010 · Physical Review. A

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVA.82.022117· OSTI ID:21456939

Lenac, Z ^[1]

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1. Department of Physics, University of Rijeka, HR-51000 Rijeka (Croatia)

We consider Casimir pressure on a slab in a configuration consisting of various dielectrics with planar symmetry. In such configurations, one usually calculates the Casimir pressure (force) on a particular slab assuming that lengths of all other slabs remain unchanged. Alternatively, one can consider a multilayer system with a fixed total length. With this restriction only, the length of each slab can eventually be changed under the Casimir pressure that will try to minimize the total Casimir energy of the system. Here we calculate the Casimir pressure on the slab in such a 'constrained' configuration and compare the results with the standard approach. It turns out that, by applying different boundary conditions, one can obtain significantly different Casimir pressures on the same object. In particular, when the thicknesses of the slab and surrounding layers are on the nanometer scale, the Casimir pressure on the slab can change from strongly squeezing in the case of fixed thicknesses of surrounding slabs to strongly relaxing in the case when only the length of the total system remains fixed.

• OSTI ID: 21456939
• Journal Information: Physical Review. A, Journal Name: Physical Review. A Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 82; ISSN 1050-2947; ISSN PLRAAN
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY
BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
CASIMIR EFFECT
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
DIELECTRIC MATERIALS
DIMENSIONS
ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS
EVALUATION
LAYERS
LENGTH
MATERIALS
SLABS
SYMMETRY
THICKNESS