Comment to "How does Casimir energy fall? IV. Gravitational interaction of regularized quantum vacuum energy" by K A Milton et al., Phys Rev D 89 064027 (2014)

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the assumptions and renormalization procedures in Casimir energy studies, proposing experiments to test the physical reality of surface energies and challenging claims about virtual photons' gravitational effects.

Contribution

It questions the validity of renormalization results in Casimir energy models and proposes feasible experiments to verify the physical existence of surface energies in real systems.

Findings

Strong evidence against dominant surface energies in physical Casimir systems

Proposed experiments to test the reality of self-energies in Casimir cavities

Critique of assumptions underlying renormalization procedures

Abstract

The Paper actually concerns a toy model, not physical Casimir cavities made of conducting plates, but the results are taken implicitly to apply in general. We question on general physical grounds one basic assumption and the results of a renormalization procedure. Then, for physical systems, i) considering condensed matter theory/experiments, we find strong evidence against the conclusive claims concerning a putative and dominating surface energy present individually on the plates, and ii) we propose two experiments with physical Casimir cavities to show in detail that the results of the renormalization in this case look somewhat paradoxical. In any case the proposed experiments appear to be feasible and thus it could be tested if the putative self-energies of the plates are indeed there in a physical Casimir cavity, or if the toy model of the Paper has by contrast no connection with physical reality. However at the moment the authors are not legitimate to issue as conclusive claims statements like- refute the claim sometimes attributed to Feynman that virtual photons do not gravitate -