Comment on "Calculation of the Casimir force between imperfectly conducting plates"

• In a recent paper [Phys. Rev. A 59, R3149 (1999)] Lamoreaux reported calculations of the Casimir force. The experimentally found permittivity was used in the calculations. Large deviations were found between numerically evaluated forces and forces derived from a series expanded plasma model. We would like to comment on a few results presented in this work. First, we claim that important features of the imaginary component of the permittivity of copper, presented in Fig. 1(a) are due to the interpolation procedure and are not caused by physical phenomena. These features influence the calculated permittivity for imaginary frequencies, which is the quantity used to calculate the Casimir attraction. Second, we discuss the extrapolation procedure used for low frequencies. The results depend substantially on how this extrapolation is performed.

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TECHNOLOGY

TEKNIKVETENSKAP

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art (subject category)