No label defined (Q4516332)

In quantum field theory, the vacuum energy manifests itself in a way which, though very peculiar at first sight, has been experimentally verified, i.e. two uncharged conducting plates attract each other. The effect was predicted by H. Casimir in 1948 on theoretical grounds and has since been intensely studied under varying circumstances. The results thus obtained depend sensitively on the boundary conditions and might even predict a repulsive force. The relevant facts have been summarized in previous books: \textit{V. Mostepanenko} and \textit{N. N. Trunov}, The Casimir Effect and its Applications, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1997) and \textit{M. Bordag} (\textit{ed}.), The Casimir Effect 50 Years Later, World Scientific, Singaporet (1999; Zbl 0923.00028). Milton also tries to survey the field while emphasizing the Green's function technique in concrete calculations. In the past decades, he contributed in so many ways to our present understanding of the effect that the book more or less recounts his personal journey through the Casimir world. Apart from discussing the equivalence with the van der Waals force (Chapter 5), he pays tribute to the Bag Model in hadronic physics (Chapter 6), treats the cosmological implications, i.e. the origin of the so-called cosmological constant (Chapter 10), and studies the sonoluminescence effect (Chapter 12) which he sees as being related to what Schwinger called the ``dynamical Casimir effect''. The book aims at graduate students and researchers in quantum field theory.