Casimir effect for finite width mirrors

CESAR FOSCO; FERNANDO LOMBARDO; FRANCISCO D. MAZZITELLI

PHYSICAL REVIEW D - PARTICLE AND FILDS

APS

Lugar: New York; Año: 2008 vol. 77 p. 85018 - 85030

0556-2821

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