| Issue |
EPL
Volume 151, Number 2, July 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 26002 | |
| Number of page(s) | 7 | |
| Section | Condensed matter and materials physics | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/adec17 | |
| Published online | 12 August 2025 | |
Measurement of the unusual dielectric response to low-frequency s-polarized evanescent waves in metals with implications for the Casimir effect(a)
1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California - Riverside, CA 92521, USA
2 Central Astronomical Observatory at Pulkovo of the Russian Academy of Sciences - Saint Petersburg, 196140, Russia
3 Peter the Great Saint Petersburg Polytechnic University - Saint Petersburg, 195251, Russia
Received: 15 May 2025
Accepted: 4 July 2025
We report precision measurements of the lateral component of the oscillating magnetic field reflected from a copper plate, which is fully determined by s-polarized evanescent waves. The measurement data are compared with theoretical predictions of classical electrodynamics using the dielectric permittivity of copper as given by the Drude model. It is shown that these predictions are excluded by the measurement data which means that the currently used Drude model does not provide a complete description of the electromagnetic response of metals for s-polarized evanescent waves. The critical importance of this result for several fields of condensed matter physics and optics dealing with evanescent waves, including the Casimir effect, is discussed.
© 2025 The author(s)
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