Quasiperiodic arrangement of magnetodielectric $\delta$-plates: Green's functions and Casimir energies for $N$ bodies

TL;DR

This paper investigates the electromagnetic Casimir energies of finite quasiperiodic arrangements of magnetodielectric delta-plates, revealing how their specific configurations influence quantum vacuum forces and resulting mechanical pressures.

Contribution

It extends previous scalar field analyses to electromagnetic fields, deriving Green's functions and Casimir energies for complex quasiperiodic plate arrangements with magnetic and dielectric properties.

Findings

Casimir energy can be positive or negative depending on the quasiperiodic structure.

Derived Green's functions for TE and TM modes of delta-plates.

Established Faddeev-like equations with transition matrices for N plates.

Abstract

We study a variety of finite quasiperiodic configurations with magnetodielectric $\delta$-function plates created from simple substitution rules. While previous studies for $N$ bodies involved interactions mediated by a scalar field, we extended our analysis of Green's function and corresponding Casimir energy to the electromagnetic field using plates with magnetic and dielectric properties for handling finite-size quasiperiodic lattices. The Casimir energy is computed for a class of quasiperiodic structures built from $N$ purely conducting or permeable $\delta$-plates. The Casimir energy of this quasiperiodic sequence of plates turns out to be either positive or negative, indicating that the pressure from the quantum vacuum tends to cause the stack of plates to expand or contract depending on their arrangement. We also handle the transverse electric and transverse magnetic mode Green's functions for $\delta$-plates and derive the Faddeev-like equation with the transition matrix for $N$ purely conducting or permeable plates.