Critical Casimir effect: Exact results

In any medium there are fluctuations due to temperature or due to the quantum nature of its constituents. If a material body is immersed into such a medium, its shape and the properties of its constituents modify the properties of the surrounding medium and its fluctuations. If in the same medium there is a second body then — in addition to all direct interactions between them — the modifications due to the first body influence the modifications due to the second body. This mutual influence results in a force between these bodies. If the excitations of the medium, which mediate the effective interaction between the bodies, are massless, this force is long-ranged and nowadays known as a Casimir force. If the fluctuating medium consists of the confined electromagnetic field in vacuum, one speaks of the quantum mechanical Casimir effect. In the case that the order parameter of material fields fluctuates – such as differences of number densities or concentrations – and that the corresponding fluctuations of the order parameter are long-ranged, one speaks of the critical Casimir effect. This holds, e.g., in the case of systems which undergo a second-order phase transition and which are thermodynamically located near the corresponding critical point, or for systems with a broken continuous symmetry exhibiting Goldstone mode excitations. Here we review the currently available exact results concerning the critical Casimir effect in systems encompassing the one-dimensional Ising, XY, and Heisenberg models, the two-dimensional Ising model, the Gaussian and the spherical models, as well as the mean field results for the Ising and the XY model. Special attention is paid to the influence of the boundary conditions on the behavior of the Casimir force. We present results both for the case of classical critical fluctuations if the system possesses a critical point at a non-zero temperature, as well as the case of quantum systems undergoing a continuous phase transition at zero temperature as function of certain parameters. As confinements we consider the film, the sphere–plane, and the sphere–sphere geometries. We discuss systems governed by short-ranged, by subleading long-ranged (i.e., of the van der Waals type), and by leading long-ranged interactions. In order to put the critical Casimir effect into the proper context and in order to make the review as self-contained as possible, basic facts about the theory of phase transitions, the theory of critical phenomena in classical and quantum systems, and finite-size scaling theory are recalled. Whenever possible, a discussion of the relevance of the exact results towards an understanding of available experiments is presented. The eventual applicability of the present results for certain devices is pointed out, too.