Recent advances in experimental techniques now permit measurement of the Casimir force with unprecedented precision. To achieve a comparable precision in the theoretical prediction of the force, it is necessary to accurately determine the electric permittivity of the materials constituting the plates along the imaginary frequency axis. The latter quantity is not directly accessible to experiments, but it can be determined via dispersion relations from experimental optical data. In the experimentally important case of conductors, however, a serious drawback of the standard dispersion relations commonly used for this purpose is their strong dependence on the chosen low-frequency extrapolation of the experimental optical data, which introduces a significant and not easily controllable uncertainty in the result. In this paper we show that a simple modification of the standard dispersion relations, involving suitable analytic window functions, resolves this difficulty, making it possible to reliably determine the electric permittivity at imaginary frequencies using solely experimental optical data in the frequency interval where they are available, without any need for uncontrolled data extrapolations.

• Received 12 February 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.81.062501