Casimir Force between a Dielectric Sphere and a Wall: A Model for Amplification of Vacuum Fluctuations

Details Casimir Force between a Dielectric Sphere and a Wall: A Model for Amplification of Vacuum Fluctuations Casimir Force between a Dielectric Sphere and a Wall: A Model for Amplification of Vacuum Fluctuations

1998-04-22

arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9804055v2

Phys. Rev. A, 58 (1998) 4279

Physics

Quantum Physics

18pp, LaTex, 7 figures, uses epsf. Several minor errors corrected, additional comments added in the final two sections, and re

Scientific paper

10.1103/PhysRevA.58.4279

The interaction between a polarizable particle and a reflecting wall is examined. A macroscopic approach is adopted in which the averaged force is computed from the Maxwell stress tensor. The particular case of a perfectly reflecting wall and a sphere with a dielectric function given by the Drude model is examined in detail. It is found that the force can be expressed as the sum of a monotonically decaying function of position and of an oscillatory piece. At large separations, the oscillatory piece is the dominant contribution, and is much larger than the Casimir-Polder interaction that arises in the limit that the sphere is a perfect conductor. It is argued that this enhancement of the force can be interpreted in terms of the frequency spectrum of vacuum fluctuations. In the limit of a perfectly conducting sphere, there are cancellations between different parts of the spectrum which no longer occur as completely in the case of a sphere with frequency dependent polarizability. Estimates of the magnitude of the oscillatory component of the force suggest that it may be large enough to be observable.

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