Casimir energies with finite-width mirrors

C. D. FOSCO, F. C. LOMBARDO, AND F. D. MAZZITELLI

PHYSICAL REVIEW D - PARTICLE AND FILDS

AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2008 vol. 77 p. 850181 - 8501812

0556-2821

   We use a functional approach to the Casimir effect in order to evaluate the exact vacuum energy for areal scalar field in d  1 dimensions, in the presence of backgrounds that, in a particular limit, imposeDirichlet boundary conditions on one or two parallel surfaces. Outside of that limit, the backgrounds aredescribed by a nonlocal effective action and may be thought of as modelling finite-width mirrors withfrequency-dependent transmission and reflection coefficients. We obtain formal expressions for theCasimir energy in general backgrounds, and provide new explicit results in some particular cases.