Casimir Interaction between Absorbing and Meta Materials

The Casimir force is one of the most accessible experimental consequences of vacuum fluctuations in the macroscopic world. It is the most significant force between neutral, non-magnetic objects at distances on the micrometer scale and below. For many experiments searching for novel short-range forces predicted by unification models, theoretical calculations of the Casimir force are crucial and have to be done at the same level of precision as the experiments. In this context, it is essential to account for the differences between the ideal Casimir case and real-world experiments, for example non-perfect reflectors made from absorbing material. This problem, in the plate-plate geometry, was solved by Lifshitz