In one minute

Kimball Milton reviews the Casimir effect, the family of phenomena implied by quantum vacuum fluctuations, with emphasis on results from the preceding four years. He rederives the force between parallel plates as the strong-coupling limit of delta-function potential planes and clarifies the role of surface divergences. For real materials he derives the Lifshitz formula from geometrical optics and rederives the Casimir-Polder forces. He gives close attention to the debate over temperature corrections to the force between real metal surfaces, and to improvements in the proximity force approximation and the state of experiments. New results on Casimir self-stress appear alongside summaries of Casimir effects for solitons and of the dynamical Casimir effect.

The Casimir effect: recent controversies and progress