Abstract
The Maxwell stress tensor is used to introduce the radiation pressure force of the electromagnetic field on a conducting surface. This expression is related to the imaginary part of the vector potential Green function for the fluctuating fields of the vacuum via the fluctuation dissipation theorem and Kubo’s formula. The formalism allows one to evaluate the vacuum radiation pressure on a conducting surface without resorting to the process of field quantization. The latter formula is used to calculate the attractive and repulsive Casimir force between two conducting plates. What is more, in this formalism, there is no need to apply any regularization procedure to recover the final result.
- Received 5 May 1999
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.60.3421
©1999 American Physical Society