Casimir potential of a compact object enclosed by a spherical cavity
- Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 (United States)
- Institut fuer Theoretische Physik, Universitaet zu Koeln, Zuelpicher Strasse 77, D-50937 Koeln (Germany)
- Center for Theoretical Physics, Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 (United States)
We study the electromagnetic Casimir interaction of a compact object contained inside a closed cavity of another compact object. We express the interaction energy in terms of the objects' scattering matrices and translation matrices that relate the coordinate systems appropriate to each object. When the enclosing object is an otherwise empty metallic spherical shell, much larger than the internal object, and the two are sufficiently separated, the Casimir force can be expressed in terms of the static electric and magnetic multipole polarizabilities of the internal object, which is analogous to the Casimir-Polder result. Although it is not a simple power law, the dependence of the force on the separation of the object from the containing sphere is a universal function of its displacement from the center of the sphere, independent of other details of the object's electromagnetic response. Furthermore, we compute the exact Casimir force between two metallic spheres contained one inside the other at arbitrary separations. Finally, we combine our results with earlier work on the Casimir force between two spheres to obtain data on the leading-order correction to the proximity force approximation for two metallic spheres both outside and within one another.
- OSTI ID:
- 21528628
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. A, Vol. 82, Issue 5; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.82.052507; (c) 2010 The American Physical Society; ISSN 1050-2947
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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