Finite temperature Casimir interaction between spheres in(D+1)-dimensional spacetime: Exact computations and asymptotic expansions

Abstract

We consider the finite temperature Casimir interaction between two Dirichlet spheres in $(D+1)$-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. The Casimir interaction free energy is derived from the zero temperature Casimir interaction energy via the Matsubara formalism. In the high temperature region, the Casimir interaction is dominated by the term with zero Matsubara frequency, and it is known as the classical term since this term is independent of the Planck constant $\ensuremath{\hbar}$. Explicit expression of the classical term is derived and it is computed exactly using appropriate similarity transforms of matrices. We then compute the small separation asymptotic expansion of this classical term up to the next-to-leading order term. For the remaining part of the finite temperature Casimir interaction with nonzero Matsubara frequencies, we obtain its small separation asymptotic behavior by applying certain prescriptions to the corresponding asymptotic expansion at zero temperature. This gives us a leading term that is shown to agree precisely with the proximity force approximation at any temperature. The next-to-leading order term at any temperature is also derived and it is expressed as an infinite sum over integrals. To obtain the asymptotic expansion at the low and medium temperature regions, we apply the inverse Mellin transform techniques. In the low temperature region, we obtain results that agree with our previous work on the zero temperature Casimir interaction.