Quantum Field Theory Under the Influence of External Conditions (QFEXT09)
Kimball A. Milton · Michael Bordag
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In one page
Every few years the people who actually measure and compute vacuum forces meet, and in September 2009 they met at Norman, Oklahoma, for the ninth time — the meeting deliberately timed for the centenary of Hendrik Casimir’s birth. Kimball Milton and Michael Bordag edited the result: sixty-eight papers over five hundred and thirty-seven pages, published by World Scientific in 2010. What the volume shows is a field that has stopped asking whether the vacuum pushes on things and started engineering with it. Several independent laboratories report precision measurements, one of them doing the experiment in ordinary air rather than in vacuum. One paper demonstrates that deep nanoscale grooves change the force by far more than the extra surface area accounts for, so the geometry of the boundary is a design variable and not a correction. Others make the force repulsive by choice of materials. Others still work on the dynamical Casimir effect, where a rapidly driven boundary turns vacuum fluctuations into real photons.
Why it matters hereChapter 2 rests on the vacuum being a measured medium rather than an inference, and this is the volume where that measurement programme reports itself in one place; chapter 6 needs the working vocabulary a vacuum-energy device would be designed in — geometry, materials, boundary motion — and this is where that vocabulary was being set.
What it claims
01By 2009 the Casimir force was a precision measurement programme run by several independent groups with different apparatus: Ricardo Decca, Daniel Lopez and Ernesto Osquiguil report new results with sample characterisation and low-temperature measurements, Hsiang-Chih Chiu and Umar Mohideen report the experimental features of the lateral Casimir force measurement, and Sven de Man, Kier Heeck, Davide Iannuzzi and their colleagues report Casimir force experiments performed in air rather than in vacuum.Contributions at pages 88 to 97, 109 to 121 and 98 to 108
Settled physics02The force depends on the shape of the boundary and not only on the gap: Ho Bun Chan and colleagues demonstrate the strong geometry dependence of the Casimir force on a surface with deep, nanoscale corrugations, and Thorsten Emig’s survey frames the whole subject as Casimir physics of geometry, shape and material.Contributions at pages 76 to 87 and 12 to 32
Settled physics03The force can be made to push instead of pull. Jeremy Munday and Federico Capasso survey repulsive Casimir and van der Waals forces from the measurements to future technologies, and further contributions treat the role of surface modes in Casimir repulsion through liquids and repulsive Casimir forces in the context of alternatives to Einsteinian gravity.Contributions at pages 127 to 136, 289 to 293 and 365 to 376
Published and peer-reviewed04Moving the boundary makes real photons out of the fluctuations, and by this meeting that had become a design problem: the volume carries theoretical studies of the dynamical Casimir effect in a superconducting artificial cavity and of the dynamical Casimir effect with Robin boundary conditions in a three-dimensional open cavity.Contributions at pages 344 to 348 and 334 to 343
Designed, not yet built05The volume also carries the strong-field frontier, where the vacuum is expected to break down into real pairs: Gerald Dunne on the search for the Schwinger effect and nonperturbative vacuum pair production, a companion paper on quantum statistics effects for Schwinger pair production in short laser pulses, and a report on the PVLAS experiment probing the quantum vacuum with light.Contributions at pages 475 to 484, 492 to 496 and 147 to 152
What to watch06The accounting question runs through the book: Lawrence Ford on negative energy densities in quantum field theory — field energy below the ambient vacuum level rather than below nothing — Stephen Fulling on vacuum energy density and pressure near boundaries, and Emil Mottola on the trace anomaly and dynamical vacuum energy in cosmology, which is the same quantity read as a laboratory force and as the energy driving cosmic expansion.Contributions at pages 437 to 446, 447 to 456 and 388 to 407
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1142/7529WHAT THIS IS. An edited proceedings volume, not a paper: the record of the ninth Conference on Quantum Field Theory under the Influence of External Conditions, held at Norman, Oklahoma, from 21 to 25 September 2009 and devoted to the centenary of the birth of Hendrik Casimir. It was published by World Scientific in May 2010, edited by Kimball A. Milton of the University of Oklahoma, who hosted the conference, and Michael Bordag of the University of Leipzig, who runs the series. The library record arrived with an empty creator list and the kind ’award’ because the volume is edited rather than authored; the editors are named as the creators here and the kind is corrected to a book. TEXT. The volume is in copyright and the publisher’s site answered an automated request on 2026-09-08 with a challenge page, so no text at all is reproduced here. The contribution titles, author lists and page ranges used as locators below are bibliographic metadata from the publisher’s own deposited chapter records — sixty-eight numbered contributions running from page 1 to page 537, with front matter at i to xxv and back matter at 538 to 540 — and the conference dates and the Casimir centenary dedication are from the INSPIRE-HEP conference record.
How to cite it
Kimball A. Milton, Michael Bordag (2010) Quantum Field Theory Under the Influence of External Conditions (QFEXT09). doi:10.1142/7529
Where it sits in the curriculum