On the Casimir entropy for a ball in front of a plane
Abstract
The violation of the third law of thermodynamics for metals described by the Drude model and for dielectrics with finite conductivity is one of the most interesting problems in the field of the Casimir effect. It manifests itself as a non-vanishing of the entropy for vanishing temperature. We review the relevant calculations for plane surfaces and calculate the corresponding contributions for a ball in front of a plane. In this geometry, these appear in much the same way as for parallel planes. We conclude that the violation of the 3rd law is not related to the infinite size of the planes.
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