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An introduction to the Casimir effect in critical phenomena

N. S. TONCHEV1,*

Affiliation

  1. Institute of Solid State Physics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 72 Tzarigradsko Chaussee Blvd., 1784 Sofia, Bulgaria

Abstract

Confinement conditions imposed on a system whose correlation function decays as a power law induce a long-range force between the surfaces limiting the system. One can generally call this phenomenon the Casimir effect. Prominent examples are systems at critical points or systems with spontaneously broken global continuous symmetry that lead to massless modes: "spin waves" or Goldstone bosons. Constrained conditions imposed on such systems lead to the so called “statistical-mechanical” or “thermodynamic” Casimir effect, a condensed matter analogue of the “electromagnetic” or “quantum – mechanical” Casimir effect, due to the constrained zero-point vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, discussed for the first time by H. G. B. Casimir (1948). The present review is devoted to the theoretical and experimental results for the thermodynamic Casimir effect..

Keywords

Thin films, Finite-size scaling, Casimir effect, Critical phenomena.

Submitted at: Nov. 28, 2006
Accepted at: Jan. 15, 2007

Citation

N. S. TONCHEV, An introduction to the Casimir effect in critical phenomena, Journal of Optoelectronics and Advanced Materials Vol. 9, Iss. 1, pp. 11-17 (2007)