Résumé:

I will discuss recent results: (i) on the Casimir torque between two metallic one-dimensional gratings rotated by an angle θ with respect to each other [1]; and (ii) on the quantitative effect of the presence of the metallic contact grid at the front side of thermophotovoltaic cells, based on a rigorous approach [2]. This effect can be tremendous both in terms of optical and electrical (resistive) losses. However, it has been theoretically either discarded or studied by means of extremely simplified models (like shadowing methods, consisting in just ignoring the fraction of the cell surface covered by metal). ------- [1] Mauro Antezza, H. B. Chan, Brahim Guizal, V.N. Marachevsky, Riccardo Messina, Mingkang Wang, Phys. Rev. Lett. 124 013903 (2020). [2] K. Austry, Y. Jeyar, M. Luo, B. Guizal, R. Messina, R. Vaillon, and M. Antezza, in preparation (2023)