Casimir pistons with hybrid boundary conditions

The Casimir effect giving rise to an attractive or repulsive force between the configuration boundaries that confine the massless scalar field is reexamined for one- to three-dimensional pistons in this paper. Especially, we consider Casimir pistons with hybrid boundary conditions, where the boundary condition on the piston is Neumann and those on other surfaces are Dirichlet. We show that the Casimir force on the piston is always repulsive, in contrast with the same problem where the boundary conditions are Dirichlet on all surfaces.