The Casimir effect with quantized charged spinor matter in background magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a uniform magnetic field and boundary conditions affect the vacuum energy of a charged spinor field between plates, revealing conditions under which the Casimir force becomes repulsive and independent of boundary specifics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that strong magnetic fields and large plate separations lead to a boundary-condition-independent repulsive Casimir force.

Findings

Strong magnetic fields induce a repulsive Casimir force.

The force becomes independent of boundary conditions at large separations.

Detection of the effect is potentially feasible with current technology.

Abstract

We study the influence of a background uniform magnetic field and boundary conditions on the vacuum of a quantized charged spinor matter field confined between two parallel neutral plates; the magnetic field is directed orthogonally to the plates. The admissible set of boundary conditions at the plates is determined by the requirement that the Dirac Hamiltonian operator be self-adjoint. It is shown that, in the case of a sufficiently strong magnetic field and a sufficiently large separation of the plates, the generalized Casimir force is repulsive, being independent of the choice of a boundary condition, as well as of the distance between the plates. The detection of this effect seems to be feasible in the foreseeable future.