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Thursday, March 03, 2016
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
T-DO Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 123 Room 121)

Quantum Lunch

World-line methods for scalar electromagnetic Casimir potentials

Daniel Steck
Oregon Center for Optics and Department of Physics

The development of new, general methods for the computation of Casimir potentials in arbitrary geometries and for arbitrary material properties remains a difficult problem. I will review our recent work on the world-line method, previously developed for scalar fields coupled to background potentials. This is a path-integral Monte-Carlo method for computing vacuum- and thermal-state energies of the field. Our work focuses on the generalization of this method to electromagnetism. I will review our recent results in considering scalar electromagnetic fields coupled to dielectrics, where we are able to reproduce a number of classic Casimir-potential results within a general framework. I will also briefly review the path towards a generalization to a full vector-electromagnetism formalism.

Host: Sebastian Deffner