Casimir energy of a BEC: from moderate interactions to the ideal gas

Abstract

Considering the Casimir effect due to phononic excitations of a weakly interacting dilute Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), we derive a renormalized expression for the zero-temperature Casimir energy of a BEC confined to a parallel plate geometry with periodic boundary conditions. Our expression is formally equivalent to the free energy of a bosonic field at finite temperature, with a nontrivial density of modes that we compute analytically. As a function of the interaction strength, smoothly describes the transition from the weakly interacting Bogoliubov regime to the non-interacting ideal BEC. For the weakly interacting case, reduces to leading order to the Casimir energy due to zero-point fluctuations of massless phonon modes. In the limit of an ideal Bose gas, our result correctly describes the Casimir energy going to zero.