Topologically protected Casimir effect for lattice fermions

Abstract: The electromagnetic Casimir effect has a fermionic counterpart in topological insulators: Zero-point fluctuations of a massless Dirac fermion field mediate a force between magnetic scatterers. The Casimir force is insensitive to disorder that preserves the topological protection of an unpaired Dirac cone. The protection may be broken if the Dirac equation is discretized, and an exponential suppression of the Casimir effect will result if a gap opens at the Dirac point. Here we show how this lattice artefact may be avoided, by applying a recently developed local discretization of the Euclidean action that does not suffer from the fermion-doubling obstruction of local discretizations of the Hamiltonian.