Electromagnetic Casimir Forces of Parabolic Cylinder and Knife-Edge Geometries

An exact calculation of electromagnetic scattering from a perfectly conducting parabolic cylinder is employed to compute Casimir forces in several configurations. These include interactions between a parabolic cylinder and a plane, two parabolic cylinders, and a parabolic cylinder and an ordinary cylinder. To elucidate the effect of boundaries, special attention is focused on the "knife-edge" limit in which the parabolic cylinder becomes a half-plane. Geometrical effects are illustrated by considering arbitrary rotations of a parabolic cylinder around its focal axis, and arbitrary translations perpendicular to this axis. A quite different geometrical arrangement is explored for the case of an ordinary cylinder placed in the interior of a parabolic cylinder. All of these results extend simply to nonzero temperatures.