We study the Casimir effect for parallel plates with massless Majorana fermions obeying the bag boundary conditions at finite temperature. The thermal influence will modify the effect. It is found that the sign of the Casimir energy remains negative if the product of the plate distance and the temperature is larger than a special value, otherwise the energy will change to positive. The Casimir energy rises with the stronger thermal influence. We show that the attractive Casimir force between two parallel plates becomes greater with increasing temperature. In the case of the piston system involving the same Majorana fermions with the same boundary conditions, the attractive force on the piston will be weaker in higher-temperature surroundings.

• Received 11 May 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.82.045005