The Casimir effect for a stack of conductive planes

Abstract

The Casimir interaction in a stack of equally spaced infinitely thin layers is investigated within the zero-frequency mode summation method. The response properties are considered to be described by a constant conductivity or by a Drude-Lorentz model with a finite set of oscillators consistent with the optical characteristics for graphite. It is found that the asymptotic distance dependence is affected significantly by the specific response. While the energy is $\sim 1/d^3$ for the constant conductivity model, the energy exhibits fractional dependence $\sim 1/d^{5/2}$ for the Drude-Lorentz description. The Casimir force on a plane is also strongly dependent upon the particular plane location in the stack. Furthermore, the calculated Casimir energy within the Drude-Lorentz model yields results in good agreement with measured cohesion energy in graphite.