Comment on “Casimir force acting on magnetodielectric bodies embedded in media”

Abstract

In a recent paper [Raabe and Welsch, Phys. Rev. A 71, 013814 (2005)] an electromagnetic energy-momentum tensor is suggested as an alternative to the Abraham-Minkowski tensor and is applied to calculations of Casimir forces in planar geometries. We argue that the universality of the suggested tensor is doubtful; application of the Raabe-Welsch theory to a simple example in classical electrodynamics shows that their proposed tensor is unable to describe the situation in a simple way. We also show that modified Casimir forces acting on the cavity medium as prescribed by these authors suffer from problems of definiteness and peculiar properties which call for experimental support before this theory can be regarded as acceptable.