An intuitive picture of the Casimir effect

Abstract The Casimir effect, which predicts the emergence of an attractive force between two parallel, highly reflecting plates in vacuum, plays a vital role in various fields of physics, from quantum field theory and cosmology to nanophotonics and condensed matter physics. Nevertheless, Casimir forces still lack an intuitive explanation and current derivations rely on regularisation procedures to remove infinities. Starting from special relativity and treating space and time coordinates equivalently, this paper overcomes no-go theorems of quantum electrodynamics and obtains a local relativistic quantum description of the electromagnetic field in free space. When extended to cavities, our approach can be used to calculate Casimir forces directly in position space without the introduction of cut-off frequencies.