The Optical Approach to Casimir Effects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel optical ray-based method for calculating Casimir forces, offering improvements over traditional approximations and adaptable to complex geometries and boundary conditions.

Contribution

The paper presents a new classical ray optics approach to compute Casimir effects, enhancing accuracy and flexibility over existing methods.

Findings

Optical path contributions can be used to determine Casimir forces.

The method improves upon the proximity force approximation.

It is adaptable to various geometries and boundary conditions.

Abstract

We propose a new approach to the Casimir effect based on classical ray optics. We define and compute the contribution of classical optical paths to the Casimir force between rigid bodies. Our approach improves upon the proximity force approximation. It can be generalized easily to arbitrary geometries, different boundary conditions, to the computation of Casimir energy densities and to many other situations. This is a brief introduction to the method. Joint work with R.L.Jaffe.