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| XXXIX Workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics | 19.06–25.06.2022 |
| XI School on Geometry and Physics | 27.06–1.07.2022 |
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Almut BeigeA fresh perspective on local photons and the Casimir effectThe Casimir effect [1] predicts the emergence of an attractive force between two parallel, highly reflecting plates in vacuum. This effect plays a vital role in various fields of physics, from quantum field theory and cosmology to nanophotonics and condensed matter physics. Nevertheless, Casimir forces still lack an intuitive explanation and current derivations still have severe weaknesses. For example, the standard derivation relies on regularisation procedures to remove infinities. Moreover, current cavity models often impose boundary conditions on the mirror surface, thereby restricting the electromagnetic field inside a cavity to standing wave modes with discrete frequencies. Such standing wave mode models cannot reproduce the typical behaviour of Fabry-Perot cavities, since they cannot account for the direction from which light enters [2]. They also contradict recent nano-cavity experiments which place light inside cavities with mirror distances well below optical wavelengths [3]. In this talk, I will discuss alternative approaches to light quantisation [4,5,6]. Starting from special relativity and treating space and time coordinates equivalently, we overcome no-go theorems of quantum electrodynamics and obtain a local relativistic quantum description of the electromagnetic field in free space [7]. When extended to cavities, our approach can be used for example to calculate Casimir forces without the introduction of cut-off frequencies directly in position space. Our local relativistic description provides new insight into the Casimir effect by attributing it to interference effects of evanescent fields. [1] H. B. G. Casimir, On the Attraction Between Two Perfectly Conducting Plates, Proc. K. Ned. Akad. Wet. 51, 793 (1948). [2] T. M. Barlow, R. Bennett and A. Beige, A master equation for a two-sided optical cavity, J. Mod. Opt. 62, S11 (2015). [3] J. J. Baumberg, J. Aizpurua, M. H. Mikkelsen and D. R. Smith, Extreme nanophotonics from ultrathin metallic gaps, Nat. Mater. 18, 668 (2019). [4] R. Bennett, T. M. Barlow, and A. Beige, A physically-motivated quantisation of the electromagnetic field, Eur. J. Phys. 37, 014001 (2016). [5] J. Southall, D. Hodgson, R. Purdy and A. Beige, Locally-acting mirror Hamiltonians, J. Mod. Opt. 68, 647 (2021). [6] D. Hodgson, J. Southall, R. Purdy and A. Beige, Quantising the electromagnetic field in position space, arXiv:2104.04499 (2021). [7] D. Hodgson, C. Burgess, M. B. Altaie, A. Beige and R. Purdy, An intuitive picture of the Casimir effect, arXiv:2203.14385 (2022). |
| Event sponsored by: | |||||
| University of Bialystok |
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