Significance of many-body contributions to Casimir energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates the importance of many-body effects in Casimir energies, demonstrating that three-body contributions are substantial and can exceed twenty percent of the total energy, with finite results for overlapping plates.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism for irreducible many-body contributions to Casimir energies and quantifies the significance of three-body effects, including a finite limit for overlapping plates.

Findings

Three-body contributions can be over 20% of total Casimir energy.

Irreducible three-body energy for overlapping plates is finite and well-defined.

The study provides a new approach to quantify many-body effects in Casimir phenomena.

Abstract

Irreducible many-body contributions to Green's functions and Casimir energies are defined. We show that the irreducible three-body contribution to Casimir energies are significant and can be more than twenty percent of the total interaction energy. Irreducible three-body contribution for three parallel semitransparent plates in the limit when two plates overlap is obtained in terms of irreducible two-body contributions and shown to be finite and well defined in this limit.