The Casimir Effect for Arbitrary Optically Anisotropic Materials

We extend a fictitious-cavity approach to calculate the Casimir effect for cavities bounded by flat anisotropic materials. We calculate the energy, force and torque in terms only of the optical coefficients of the walls of the cavity. We calculate the Casimir effect at zero and finite temperature for some simple systems. As a non trivial application, we calculate the torque between a semi-infinite anisotropic plate and an anisotropic film. We study the effect of the film thickness in the torque and find an optimal width that maximizes the torque.