Coupled surface polaritons and the Casimir force
Résumé
The Casimir force between metallic plates made of realistic materialsis evaluated for distances in the nanometer range. A spectrum overreal frequencies is introduced and shows narrow peaks due to surfaceresonances (plasmon polaritons or phonon polaritons) that are coupledacross the vacuum gap. We demonstrate that the Casimir forceoriginates from the attraction (repulsion) due to the correspondingsymmetric (antisymmetric) eigenmodes, respectively. This picture isused to derive a simple analytical estimate of the Casimir force atshort distances. We recover the result known for Drude metals withoutabsorption and compute the correction for weakly absorbing materials.
Domaines
Optique [physics.optics]
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