Quantum fluctuations of massless scalar fields represented by quantum
fluctuations of the quasiparticle vacuum in a zero-temperature dilute
Bose-Einstein condensate may well provide the first experimental arena for
measuring the Casimir force of a field other than the electromagnetic field.
This would constitute a real Casimir force measurement - due to quantum
fluctuations - in contrast to thermal fluctuation effects. We develop a
multidimensional cut-off technique for calculating the Casimir energy of
massless scalar fields in d-dimensional rectangular spaces with q large
dimensions and d−q dimensions of length L and generalize the technique to
arbitrary lengths. We explicitly evaluate the multidimensional remainder and
express it in a form that converges exponentially fast. Together with the
compact analytical formulas we derive, the numerical results are exact and easy
to obtain. Most importantly, we show that the division between analytical and
remainder is not arbitrary but has a natural physical interpretation. The
analytical part can be viewed as the sum of individual parallel plate energies
and the remainder as an interaction energy. In a separate procedure, via
results from number theory, we express some odd-dimensional homogeneous Epstein
zeta functions as products of one-dimensional sums plus a tiny remainder and
calculate from them the Casimir energy via zeta function regularization.Comment: 42 pages, 3 figures. v.2: typos corrected to match published versio
