Bound of Casimir Effect by Holography

Abstract: Inspired by the Kovtun-Son-Starinet bound, we propose that holography impose a lower bound on the Casimir effect. For simplicity, we focus on the Casimir effect between parallel planes for 3d conformal field theories and briefly comment on the generalizations to other boundary shapes and higher dimensions. Remarkably, the ghost-free holographic models impose a universal lower bound of the Casimir effect. We verify the holographic bound by free theories, Ising model, and $O(N)$ model with $N=2,3$ at critical points. Remarkably, the holographic bound is also obeyed by a general class of quantum field theories without conformal symmetries. It is interesting to find a field-theoretical proof or counterexample for the holographic bound of Casimir effect.