The Casimir force between parallel plates separated by anisotropic media with in-plane optical axis

¹ School of Science, Hubei University of Technology - Wuhan 430068, PRC
² MOE Key Laboratory of Fundamental Physical Quantities Measurement, Hubei Key Laboratory of Gravitation and Quantum Physics, School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology - Wuhan 430074, PRC
³ School of Engineering, Huzhou University - Huzhou 313000, Zhejiang, PRC
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University - Zheda Road 38#, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310027, PRC
⁵ School of Computer Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Technology - Guangzhou 510006, PRC

^(a) gangdeng@hbut.edu.cn
^(b) lcy@zjhu.edu.cn

Received: 9 March 2019
Accepted: 27 May 2019

Abstract

The Casimir force is calculated both analytically and numerically by the surface mode technique in the configuration of two parallel plates separated by an anisotropic media with in-plane optical axis. The result reveals that the relative impact of the anisotropy on the Casimir force decreases with the separation and different signs of the anisotropy could correspond to different impacts on the directions of the Casimir force. The anisotropy can change the average value of permittivity of the intervening media and then change the inequality among the permittivities of the two plates and the intervening media, which is the physical explanation for the behaviours above. The thermal effect is also calculated and compared with previous results. It shows that the non-zero temperature tends to suppress the impact of anisotropy at small separations but to enhance it at large separations in our case.