Surface plasmon modes and the Casimir energy - Archive ouverte HAL Access content directly
Journal Articles Physical Review Letters Year : 2005

Surface plasmon modes and the Casimir energy

Abstract

We show the influence of surface plasmons on the Casimir effect between two plane parallel metallic mirrors at arbitrary distances. Using the plasma model to describe the optical response of the metal, we express the Casimir energy as a sum of contributions associated with evanescent surface plasmon modes and propagative cavity modes. In contrast to naive expectations, the plasmonic modes contribution is essential at all distances in order to ensure the correct result for the Casimir energy. One of the two plasmonic modes gives rise to a repulsive contribution, balancing out the attractive contributions from propagating cavity modes, while both contributions taken separately are much larger than the actual value of the Casimir energy. This also suggests possibilities to tailor the sign of the Casimir force via surface plasmons.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
prl.pdf (172.89 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-00011121 , version 1 (10-10-2005)

Identifiers

Cite

Astrid Lambrecht, Francesco Intravaia. Surface plasmon modes and the Casimir energy. Physical Review Letters, 2005, 94, pp.110404. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.110404⟩. ⟨hal-00011121⟩
183 View
102 Download

Altmetric

Share

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More