An intuitive picture of the Casimir effect

TL;DR

This paper offers an intuitive, local relativistic quantum framework for understanding the Casimir effect, enabling direct position-space calculations without regularisation or cut-offs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel local relativistic quantum approach to the Casimir effect, overcoming previous no-go theorems and simplifying force calculations.

Findings

Provides an intuitive picture of the Casimir effect.

Enables direct position-space calculations of Casimir forces.

Eliminates the need for regularisation procedures.

Abstract

The Casimir effect, which predicts the emergence of an attractive force between two parallel, highly reflecting plates in vacuum, plays a vital role in various fields of physics, from quantum field theory and cosmology to nanophotonics and condensed matter physics. Nevertheless, Casimir forces still lack an intuitive explanation and current derivations rely on regularisation procedures to remove infinities. Starting from special relativity and treating space and time coordinates equivalently, this paper overcomes no-go theorems of quantum electrodynamics and obtains a local relativistic quantum description of the electromagnetic field in free space. When extended to cavities, our approach can be used to calculate Casimir forces directly in position space without the introduction of cut-off frequencies.