On the Casimir interaction between holes in a plate

Authors

Daniel N. Kabat, CUNY Lehman CollegeFollow
Dimitra Karabali, CUNY Lehman CollegeFollow
V P. Nair, CUNY City College of New YorkFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2010

Abstract

We study the leading long-distance attractive force between two holes in a plate arising from a scalar eld with Dirichlet boundary conditions on the plate. We use a formalism in which the interaction is governed by a non-local eld theory which lives on the two holes. The interaction energy is proportional to Q1Q2=r7 at large separation r, where Q1 and Q2 are certain charges associated with the holes. We compute these charges for round and rectangular holes. We show that the 1=r7 behavior is universal for separations large compared to the linear dimensions of the holes, irrespective of the spin or interactions of the bosonic eld. We also study the interaction between two long thin slits, for which the energy falls o as 1=r 6.

Comments

This is the pre-published version of an article originally published in Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, available at DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.82.025014.