Casimir effect and deconfinement phase transition

We show that the Casimir effect may lead to a deconfinement phase transition induced by the presence of boundaries in confining gauge theories. Using first-principle numerical simulations we demonstrate this phenomenon in the simplest case of the compact lattice electrodynamics in two spatial dimensions. We find that the critical temperature of the deconfinement transition in the vacuum between two parallel dielectric/metallic wires is a monotonically increasing function of the separation between the wires. At infinite separation the wires do not affect the critical temperature while at small separations the vacuum between the wires loses the confinement property due to modification of vacuum fluctuations of virtual monopoles.