Thermal Casimir Effect in the Plane-Sphere Geometry

The thermal Casimir force between two metallic plates is known to depend on the description of material properties. For large separations the dissipative Drude model leads to a force a factor of 2 smaller than the lossless plasma model. Here we show that the plane-sphere geometry, in which current experiments are performed, decreases this ratio to a factor of 3/2, as revealed by exact numerical and large-distance analytical calculations. For perfect reflectors, we find a repulsive contribution of thermal photons to the force and negative entropy values at intermediate distances.