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The Casimir Forces

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Electromagnetic Fluctuations at the Nanoscale

Part of the book series: NanoScience and Technology ((NANO))

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Abstract

To obtain a simple picture of the origin of the Casimir force, we begin this section by considering a system of two plane-parallel plates of ideal conductors, following the original Casimir paper [39]. These planes produce a waveguide. The number of electromagnetic modes in the waveguide is discrete and depends on the width of the waveguide. From quantum electrodynamics, it is known that each mode with frequency \(\omega \) has a minimum energy \(\hbar \omega /2\) referred to as vacuum fluctuations or zero point motion.

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Correspondence to Aleksandr I. Volokitin .

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Volokitin, A.I., Persson, B.N. (2017). The Casimir Forces. In: Electromagnetic Fluctuations at the Nanoscale. NanoScience and Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53474-8_5

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