Eur. Phys. J. D 64, 1-3 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2011-20109-1

Regular Article

Casimir friction in terms of moving harmonic oscillators: equivalence between two different formulations

¹ Department of Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway
² Department of Energy and Process Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway

^a e-mail: iver.h.brevik@ntnu.no

Received: 6 January 2011
Received in final form: 27 May 2011
Published online: 27 July 2011

Abstract

The Casimir friction problem can be dealt with in a simplified way by considering two harmonic oscillators moving with constant relative velocity. Recently we calculated the energy dissipation ΔE for such a case [Europhys. Lett. 91, 60003 (2010); Eur. Phys. J. D 61, 335 (2011)]. A recent study of Barton [New J. Phys. 12, 113044 (2010)] seemingly leads to a different result for the dissipation. If such a discrepancy really were true, it would imply a delicate difficulty for the basic theory of Casimir friction. In the present note we show that the expressions for ΔE are in fact physically equivalent, at T = 0.