Thermal issues in Casimir forces between conductors and semiconductors

Abstract

The Casimir effect between metal surfaces has now been well-verified at the few per cent level experimentally. However, the temperature dependence has never been observed in the laboratory, since all experiments are conducted at room temperature. The temperature dependence for the related Casimir–Polder force between an atom and a bulk material has, in contrast, been observed between a Bose–Einstein condensate and a silica substrate, with the environment and the silica held at different temperatures. There is a controversy about the temperature dependence for the force between metals, having to do with the magnitude of the linear temperature term for both low and high temperature, the latter being most prominent at large distances. There are also related anomalies pertaining to semiconductors. The status of this controversy, and of the relevant experiments, is reviewed in this report.