Ferminoic Casimir effect between spheres

Abstract

We consider the Casimir interaction between two spheres corresponding to massless Dirac fields with MIT-bag boundary conditions. Using operator approach, we derive the TGTG-formula for the Casimir interaction energy between the two spheres. A byproduct is the explicit formula for the translation matrix that relates the fermionic spherical waves in different coordinate systems. In the large separation limit, it is found that the order of the Casimir interaction energy is $L^{-5}$, where $L$ is the separation between the centers of the spheres. This order is intermediate between that of two Dirichlet spheres (of order $L^{-3}$) and two Neumann spheres (of order $L^{-7}$). In the small separation limit, we derive analytically the asymptotic expansion of the Casimir interaction energy up to the next-to-leading order term. The leading term agrees with the proximity force approximation. The result for the next-to-leading order term is compared to the corresponding results for scalar fields and electromagnetic fields.