Electromagnetic Casimir forces of parabolic cylinder and knife-edge geometries

An exact calculation of electromagnetic scattering from a perfectly conducting parabolic cylinder is employed to compute Casimir forces in several configurations. These include interactions between a parabolic cylinder and a plane, two parabolic cylinders, and a parabolic cylinder and an ordinary cy...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Graham, Noah, Shpunt, Alexander Anatoly, Emig, Thorsten, Rahi, Sahand Jamal, Jaffe, Robert L., Kardar, Mehran
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2011
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/65851
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0262-3645
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1112-5912
Description
Summary:An exact calculation of electromagnetic scattering from a perfectly conducting parabolic cylinder is employed to compute Casimir forces in several configurations. These include interactions between a parabolic cylinder and a plane, two parabolic cylinders, and a parabolic cylinder and an ordinary cylinder. To elucidate the effect of boundaries, special attention is focused on the “knife-edge” limit in which the parabolic cylinder becomes a half-plane. Geometrical effects are illustrated by considering arbitrary rotations of a parabolic cylinder around its focal axis, and arbitrary translations perpendicular to this axis. A quite different geometrical arrangement is explored for the case of an ordinary cylinder placed in the interior of a parabolic cylinder. All of these results extend simply to nonzero temperatures.