Semiclassical electron models: Casimir self-stress in dielectric and conducting balls

✍ Scribed by Kimball A Milton

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1980
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 572 KB
• Volume: 127
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-4916
• DOI: 10.1016/0003-4916(80)90149-9

✦ Synopsis

The Casimir self-stress, due to fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, for a solid dielectric ball is calculated using a formalism previously employed for the reevaluation of the repulsive Casimir stress on a conducting spherical shell. Even after volume energy subtractions are performed, the results are cutoff dependent. It is argued that the cutoffdependent term is spurious, perhaps being a modification to the phenomenological description of the medium, and so should be cancelled by a contact term. If so, we are left with an attractive Casimir stress, which could play the role of the Poincare stress in classical electron theory. The limit E + co, a perfectly conducting ball, is more convergent and gives a parameter-free value for the One-structure constant, a N 1/4~.