Maxwell eigenmode approach to the Casimir-Lifshitz torque

More than 40 years ago, Barash published a calculation of the full retarded Casimir-Lifshitz torque for planar birefringent media with arbitrary degrees of anisotropy. An independent theoretical confirmation has been lacking since. We report a systematic and transparent derivation of the torque betw...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Broer, Wijnand, Liow, John Yuh Han, Lu, Bing-Sui
Other Authors: School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/83530
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/49768
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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Summary:More than 40 years ago, Barash published a calculation of the full retarded Casimir-Lifshitz torque for planar birefringent media with arbitrary degrees of anisotropy. An independent theoretical confirmation has been lacking since. We report a systematic and transparent derivation of the torque between two media with both electric and magnetic birefringence. Our approach, based on an eigenmode decomposition of Maxwell's equations, generalizes Barash's result for electrically birefringent materials, and can be generalized to a wide range of anisotropic materials and finite thickness effects.