We provide a review of both new experimental and theoretical developments in the Casimir e ect. The Casimir e ect results from the alteration by the boundaries of the zero-point electromagnetic energy. Unique to the Casimir force is its strong dependence on shape, switching from attractive to repulsive as function of the size, geometry and topology of the boundary. Thus, the Casimir force is a ...

Using a recently developed theory of the Casimir force (Raabe C and Welsch D-G 2005 Phys. Rev. A 71 013814), we calculate the force that acts on a plate in front of a planar wall and the force that acts on the plate in the case where the plate is part of matter that fills the space in front of the wall. We show that in the limit of a dielectric plate whose permittivity is close to unity, the fo...

The Casimir force due to thermal fluctuations (or pseudo-Casimir force) was recently calculated for the perfect Bose gas in the slab geometry for various boundary conditions. The Casimir pressure due to quantum fluctuations in a weakly-interacting dilute Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) confined to a parallel plate geometry was also recently calculated for Dirichlet boundary conditions. In this p...

The Casimir force between metallic plates made of realistic materials is evaluated for distances in the nanometer range. A spectrum over real frequencies is introduced and shows narrow peaks due to surface resonances (plasmon polaritons or phonon polaritons) that are coupled across the vacuum gap. We demonstrate that the Casimir force originates from the attraction (repulsion) due to the corres...

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 ...

In this paper we study the Casimir force for a piston configuration in R 3 with one dimension being slightly curved and the other two infinite. We work for two different cases with this setup. In the first, the piston is " free to move " along a transverse dimension to the curved one and in the other case the piston " moves " along the curved one. We find that the Casimir force has opposite sig...

The Casimir effect of a piston for massless scalar fields which satisfy Dirichlet boundary conditions in the context of five-dimensional Randall-Sundrum models is studied. In these scenarios we derive and calculate the expression for the Casimir force on the piston. We also discuss the Casimir force in the limit that one outer plate is moved to the remote place to show that the nature of the re...

This paper aims to investigate the pull-in phenomenon of functionally graded (FG) capacitive nanocantilevers subjected to an electrostatic force and thermal moment due to an applied voltage and thermal shock considering intermolecular force within the framework of nonlocal elasticity theory to account for the small scale effect. The FG nano-beam is made of mixture of metal and ceramic which the...

Experiments on 4He films reveal an attractive Casimir-like force at the bulk lambda point and in the superfluid regime. Previous work has explained the magnitude of this force at the lambda transition and deep in the superfluid region but not the substantial attractive force immediately below the lambda point. Utilizing a simple mean-field calculation renormalized by critical fluctuations we ob...

Vacuum fluctuations have observable consequences, like the Casimir force between two plates in vacuum. There now exists good agreement between theory and experimental measurements of this force. The role of the Casimir effect in diverse fields such as Quantum Field Theory, Condensed Matter Physics and Atomic Physics etc is discussed. A brief description of current applications to nanotechnology...