Remarks on the Casimir force for magnetodielectric media (1808.02205v2)

Abstract: Boyer showed that a perfect electrically conducting slab repels a perfect magnetically conducting slab, in contrast to the attractive Casimir force between two identical perfect electrically/magnetically conducting slabs. To gain insight for the difference between the Boyer force and the Casimir force, we present the derivation of the Boyer force using the stress tensor method and then using the method of variation in dielectric. The Green dyadic, in terms of electric and magnetic Green's functions, is presented for an electric medium filling half of space and another magnetic medium filling another half of space such that the two half-spaces are parallel and separated by a distance $a$. We make the observation that the spectral distribution of scattering in a Boyer cavity is that of Fermi-Dirac type, while the spectral distribution of scattering in a Casimir cavity is that of Bose-Einstein type. Based on this observation we conclude that the difference between the Boyer force and the Casimir force is governed by the statistics of the possible scattering in the respective cavities.