Complete zeta-function approach to the electromagnetic Casimir effect for spheres and circles (Q1383721)

A method for evaluating the electromagnetic Casimir energy in situations involving spherical or circular boundaries is presented. Rigorous use is made of zeta function regularization techniques and also of properties of Bessel and related zeta functions in order to simplify the results considerably. New calculations for the Casimir energy for an electromagnetic field in the presence of a sphere in \(D=3\) and a circle in \(D=2\), with perfect conductor conditions, are given in the paper. They agree with already known results. A more detailed summary of the contents of the paper is as follows. After a brief survey on electromagnetism, general considerations about the physical problem of the Maxwell modes and its spectral zeta function are discussed. First, the part associated with the internal transverse electric modes is considered, with particular emphasis on the zeta function for the zeros of the \(J_\nu\) Bessel function and on the construction of the corresponding complete zeta function. The same procedure is applied then to the internal transverse magnetic part, and again the same method is repeated once more for the external modes. In this way, the authors manage to obtain, in the end, a decomposition of the whole contribution to the Casimir energy into four individual contributions, allowing them to select the effect coming from, e.g., the interior part only of the Dirichlet modes. Some parts of the heavy mathematical calculations are relegated to three appendices. One should mention that in Ref. 18 of the paper [\textit{M. Bordag}, \textit{E. Elizalde} and \textit{K. Kirsten}, J. Math. Phys. 37, 895-916 (1996; Zbl 0862.58049)], a more powerful method to perform this sort of calculations was pioneered that considerably simplifies and thus allows to extend the method of zeta function regularization to much more involved situations than the ones considered here. As already indicated, the results obtained by the authors remarkably agree with previous calculations, where different regularizations had been used. A new result for the zeta-regularized Casimir energy for a circular wire is presented.