The Casimir energy for a rectangular cavity at finite temperature

摘要

In this paper the Casimir effect arising from the case of Dirichlet boundary conditions confining the massless scalar field at finite temperature is reexamined for a (D - 1)-dimensional rectangular cavity with equal or unequal finite p edges and different spacetime dimensions D. We derive an expression for the Casimir energy for a p-dimensional cavity at nonzero temperature, We show that the sign of the Casimir energy remains positive irrespective of whether p is odd or even if the thermal corrections to the standard Casimir effect are sufficiently large. Furthermore, we also find the temperature influences on choosing edges which lead to the Casimir energy being positive or negative. [References: 13]