In his autobiography Casimir barely mentioned the Casimir effect, but remarked that it is “of some theoretical significance” [1]. We will describe some aspects of Casimir effects that appear to be of particular significance now, more than half a century after Casimir’s famous paper [2].

We propose a new approach to the Casimir effect based on classical ray optics. We define and compute the contribution of classical optical paths to the Casimir force between rigid bodies. Our approach improves upon the proximity force approximation. It can be generalized easily to arbitrary geometries, different boundary conditions, to the computation of Casimir energy densities and to many oth...

We analyze the high temperature (or classical) limit of the Casimir effect. A useful quantity which arises naturally in our discussion is the “relative Casimir energy”, which we define for a configuration of disjoint conducting boundaries of arbitrary shapes, as the difference of Casimir energies between the given configuration and a configuration with the same boundaries infinitely far apart. ...

Negative values of the Casimir entropy occur quite frequently at low temperatures in arrangements of metallic objects. The physical reason lies either in the dissipative nature of the metals as is the case for the plane-plane geometry or in the geometric form of the objects involved. Examples for the latter are the sphere-plane and the sphere-sphere geometry, where negative Casimir entropies ca...

We show the influence of surface plasmons on the Casimir effect between two plane parallel metallic mirrors at arbitrary distances. Using the plasma model to describe the optical response of the metal, we express the Casimir energy as a sum of contributions associated with evanescent surface plasmon modes and propagative cavity modes. In contrast to naive expectations, the plasmonic mode contri...

We analyze the high temperature (or classical) limit of the Casimir effect (for various massless fields). A simple physical argument suggests that the Casimir energy (as opposed to the Casimir free energy) should vanish in the classical limit. We check the validity of this argument for massless scalar field confined in a cavity with boundaries of arbitrary shape, using path integral formalism. ...

Casimir pistons are models in which finite Casimir forces can be calculated without any suspect renormalizations. It has been suggested that such forces are always attractive, but we present several counterexamples, notably a simple type of quantum graph in which the sign of the force depends upon the number of edges. We also show that Casimir forces in quantum graphs can be reliably computed b...

This article is divided in three sections. In the first section we briefly review some high precision experiments on the Casimir force, underlying an important aspect of the analysis of the data. In the second section we discuss our recent results in the measurement of the Casimir force using non-trivial materials. In the third section we present some original ideas for experiments on new pheno...

We present a variety of methods to derive the Casimir interaction in planar systems containing two-dimensional layers. Examples where this can be of use is graphene, graphene-like layers and two-dimensional electron gases. We present results for two free standing layers and for one layer above a substrate. The results can easily be extended to systems with a larger number of layers. Submitted t...

We study the influence of Casimir energy on the critical field of a superconducting film, and we show that by this means it might be possible to directly measure, for the first time, the variation of Casimir energy that accompanies the superconducting transition. It is shown that this novel approach may also help clarifying the long-standing controversy on the contribution of TE zero modes to t...