The Casimir Effect for Arbitrary Optically Anisotropic Materials

TL;DR

This paper extends a cavity approach to compute the Casimir effect in anisotropic materials, deriving energy, force, and torque based on optical properties, and explores the influence of film thickness on torque maximization.

Contribution

It introduces a method to calculate Casimir forces and torques for arbitrary anisotropic materials using optical coefficients, including finite temperature effects.

Findings

Torque is maximized at an optimal film thickness.

The method applies to both zero and finite temperature scenarios.

Calculated Casimir energy and force for simple anisotropic systems.

Abstract

We extend a fictitious-cavity approach to calculate the Casimir effect for cavities bounded by flat anisotropic materials. We calculate the energy, force and torque in terms only of the optical coefficients of the walls of the cavity. We calculate the Casimir effect at zero and finite temperature for some simple systems. As a non trivial application, we calculate the torque between a semi-infinite anisotropic plate and an anisotropic film. We study the effect of the film thickness in the torque and find an optimal width that maximizes the torque.