Maxwell's theory is still an essential backbone of physics today. Nevertheless, the introduction of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century introduced new aspects of electromagnetism. Perhaps most importantly, it was discovered that light comes in discrete units called photons and behaves in some ways both as a wave and a particle. Though electromagnetism on the human scale still behaves largely as the classical theory predicts, at small scales there are quantum effects to account for. Around the middle of the century, physicists Richard Feynman, Shinichiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and many others devised a new theory of quantum electrodynamics (or QED) that described how light and matter interact, even on quantum scales.
Naturally, QED predicted new phenomena that classical electromagnetism had not. One especially profound change was the idea of vacuum energy. For most purposes, "vacuum" is synonymous with "empty space". As is typical of quantum mechanics, however, a system is rarely considered to be in a single state, but rather in a superposition of many different states simultaneously. These different states can have different "weights" so that the system is "more" in one given state than another. This paradigm applies even to the vacuum. Certain pairs of particles may appear and disappear spontaneously in many of these states and even exchange photons. Some of the possible interactions are illustrated below with Feynman Diagrams.
In these diagrams, the loops represent the evanescent virtual particle pairs described above. Wavy lines represent the exchange of photons. Each of the six diagrams represents a possible vacuum interaction, and there are many more besides (infinitely many, in fact!). The takeaway is that the QED vacuum is not empty, but rather a "soup" of virtual particle interactions due to quantum fluctuations. Further, these interactions have energy, known as vacuum energy. This, at least, is the mathematical description. There are some curious aspects to this description, because the vacuum energy calculation in any finite volume yields a divergent series. In other words, there is theoretically an infinite amount of vacuum energy in any finite volume! Because of this, physicists devised a process called renormalization that cancels out these infinities in calculations describing the interaction of real particles. This process in fact gives results that have been confirmed by experiment. Nevertheless, it does not follow that the infinite vacuum energy exists in any "real" sense or is accessible to measurement. One possible way in which it is, however, is the Casimir Effect.
The setup of the Casimir effect involves two conducting metal plates placed parallel to one another. The fact that the plates are conducting is important because the electric field vanishes inside conducting materials. Now, the vacuum energy between the plates can be calculated as a sum over the possible wavelengths of the fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. However, unlike the free space vacuum, the possible wavelengths are limited by the size of the available space: the longest wavelength contributions to the vacuum energy do not occur between the plates (this is schematically illustrated in the image above). A careful subtraction of the vacuum energy density inside the plates from outside yields that there is more energy outside. Remarkably, this causes an attractive force between these plates known as the Casimir force. The force increases as the distance between plates is decreased. Precisely, the magnitude of the force F is proportional to 1/d4, where d is the distance between the plates. As a result, if the distance is halved, the force goes up by a factor of sixteen! The initial calculation of this effect was due to H.G.B Casimir in 1948.
Around 50 years after first being postulated, the effect was finally measured experimentally with significant precision. The primary issue was that for the Casimir force to be large enough to measure, the metal plates would have to be put very close to one another, less than 1 micrometer (0.001 mm). Even then, very sensitive instruments are necessary to measure the force. One landmark experiment took place in 1998. Due to the practical difficulty of maintaining two parallel plates very close to one another, this experiment utilized one metal plate and one metal sphere with a radius large compared to the separation (so that it would "look" like a flat plate close up). The authors of the experiment also added corrections to Casimir's original equation accounting for the sphere instead of the plane and the roughness of the metal surfaces (at the small distances of the experiment, microscopic bumps matter). They obtained the following data for the force as it varies with distance:
In the figure above, the squares indicate data points from the experiment and the curve is the theoretical model (including the corrections mentioned). The distance on the x-axis is in nanometers and the smallest distance measured was around 100 nm, hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. Even at these minuscule distances, the force only reached a magnitude of about 1*10-10 Newtons, a billion times smaller than the weight of a piece of paper. Nevertheless, the results confirmed the presence of the Casimir force to high accuracy.
The existence of the Casimir effect would seem to vindicate the rather strange predictions of QED with respect to the quantum vacuum, suggesting that it is indeed full of energy that can be tapped, if indirectly. However, others have argued that it is possible to derive the effect without reference to the energy of the vacuum, and therefore the experiment does not necessarily mean that vacuum energy is "real" in any meaningful way. Continued study into the existence of vacuum energy may help to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe since some mysterious "dark energy" is believed to be the source. In the mean time, the Casimir effect is an important experimental verification of QED and could someday see applications in nanotechnology, since the force would be relatively large on small scales.
Sources: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-casimir-effec/, https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0503158.pdf, The Quantum Vacuum: An Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics by Peter W. Milonni, http://web.mit.edu/kardar/www/research/seminars/PolymerForce/articles/PRL-Mohideen98.pdf
Greatt post thank you
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