Abstract

An analysis is carried out involving reversible thermodynamic operations on arbitrarily shaped small cavities in perfectly conducting material. These operations consist of quasistatic deformations and displacements of cavity walls and objects within the cavity. This analysis necessarily involves the consideration of Casimir-like forces. Typically, even for the simplest of geometrical structures, such calculations become quite complex, as they need to take into account changes in singular quantities. Much of this complexity is reduced significantly here by working directly with the change in electromagnetic fields as a result of the deformation and displacement changes. A key result of this work is the derivation that for such cavity structures, classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation is the appropriate spectrum at a temperature of absolute zero to ensure that the reversible deformation operations obey both isothermal and adiabatic conditions. In addition, a generalized Wien displacement law is obtained from the demand that the change in entropy of the radiation in these arbitrarily shaped structures must be a state function of temperature and frequency