Radiative corrections to the Casimir energy and effective field theory

Abstract

We discuss radiative corrections to the Casimir effect from an effective field theory point of view. It is an improvement and more complete version of a previous discussion by Kong and Ravndal. By writing down the most general effective Lagrangian respecting the symmetries and the boundary conditions, we are able to reproduce earlier results of Bordag, Robaschik and Wieczorek calculated in full QED. They obtained the correction E_0^(1) = \pi^2\alpha/2560mL^4 to the Casimir energy. We find that this leading correction is due to surface terms in the effective theory, which we attribute to having dominant fluctuations localized on the plates.