Divergence of Casimir stress in inhomogeneous media
Abstract
We examine the local behavior of the regularized stress tensor commonly used in calculations of the Casimir force for a dielectric medium inhomogeneous in one direction. It is shown that the usual expression for the stress tensor is not finite anywhere within the medium, whatever the temporal dispersion or index profile, and that this divergence is unlikely to be removed through a simple modification to the regularization procedure. Our analytic argument is illustrated numerically for a medium approximated as a series of homogeneous strips, as the width of these strips is taken to zero. The findings hold for all magnetodielectric media.
Citation
Simpson , W M R , Horsley , S A R & Leonhardt , U 2013 , ' Divergence of Casimir stress in inhomogeneous media ' , Physical Review. A, Atomic, molecular, and optical physics , vol. 87 , no. 4 , 043806 . https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.87.043806
Publication
Physical Review. A, Atomic, molecular, and optical physics
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1050-2947Type
Journal article
Rights
©2013 American Physical Society.
Description
This work is financially supported by EPSRC and SUPACollections
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