The Casimir Force was predicted in 1948 by Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir. Casimir realized that when calculating the energy between two parallel uncharged conducting plates, only those virtual photons whose wavelengths fit an integral number of times into the gap should be counted. Each mode contributes to a pressure on the plates, and the infinite number of modes outside the plates is in so...

We study critical Casimir forces between planar walls and geometrically structured substrates within mean-field theory. As substrate structures, crenellated surfaces consisting of periodic arrays of rectangular crenels and merlons are considered. Within the widely used proximity force approximation, both the top surfaces of the merlons and the bottom surfaces of the crenels contribute to the cr...

Integrated optical switches using mechano-optical sensing are gaining more attention in many fields due to their fast switching speed, large bandwidth and compact devices. In this paper, a micromachined electrostatically actuated metal plate to sense the evanescent field above the waveguide is presented. The feasibility of MEMS based light weight mechanical plates to achieve fast switching is e...

We study the influence of the shape of compact dimensions to the Casimir energy and Casimir force of a scalar field. We examine both the massive and the massless scalar field. The total spacetime topology is M D ×T 2 θ , where M D is the D dimensional Minkowski spacetime and T 2 θ the twisted torus described by R 1 , R 2 and θ. For the case R 1 = R 2 we found that the massive bulk scalar field ...

We study the thermal interaction between two nearby thin metallic wires, at finite temperature. It is shown that the Johnson currents in the wires give rise, via inductive coupling, to a repulsive force between them. This thermal interaction exhibits all the puzzling features found recently in the thermal Casimir effect for lossy metallic plates, suggesting that the physical origin of the diffi...

We study the Casimir problem for a fermion coupled to a static background field in one space dimension. We examine the relationship between interactions and boundary conditions for the Dirac field. In the limit that the background becomes concentrated at a point (a “Dirac spike”) and couples strongly, it implements a confining boundary condition. We compute the Casimir energy for a masslike bac...

We propose the use of a tunneling electromechanical transducer to dinamically detect Casimir forces between two conducting surfaces. The maximum distance for which Casimir forces should be detectable with our method is around 1μm, while the lower limit is given by the ability to approach the surfaces. This technique should permit to study gravitational forces on the same range of distances, as ...

We present improved worldline numerical algorithms for high-precision calculations of Casimir interaction energies induced by scalar-field fluctuations with Dirichlet boundary conditions for various Casimir geometries. Significant reduction of numerical cost is gained by exploiting the symmetries of the worldline ensemble in combination with those of the configurations. This facilitates high-pr...