No Arabic abstract
We study the zero and finite temperature Casimir force acting on a perfectly conducting piston with arbitrary cross section moving inside a closed cylinder with infinitely permeable walls. We show that at any temperature, the Casimir force always tends to move the piston away from the walls and towards its equilibrium position. In the case of rectangular piston, exact expressions for the Casimir force are derived. In the high temperature regime, we show that the leading term of the Casimir force is linear in temperature and therefore the Casimir force has a classical limit. Due to duality, all these result also hold for an infinitely permeable piston moving inside a closed cylinder with perfectly conducting walls.
Casimir and Casimir-Polder repulsion have been known for more than 50 years. The general Lifshitz configuration of parallel semi-infinite dielectric slabs permits repulsion if they are separated by a dielectric fluid that has a value of permittivity that is intermediate between those of the dielectric slabs. This was indirectly confirmed in the 1970s, and more directly by Capassos group recently. It has also been known for many years that electrically and magnetically polarizable bodies can experience a repulsive quantum vacuum force. More amenable to practical application are situations where repulsion could be achieved between ordinary conducting and dielectric bodies in vacuum. The status of the field of Casimir repulsion with emphasis on recent developments will be surveyed. Here, stress will be placed on analytic developments, especially of Casimir-Polder (CP) interactions between anisotropically polarizable atoms, and CP interactions between anisotropic atoms and bodies that also exhibit anisotropy, either because of anisotropic constituents, or because of geometry. Repulsion occurs for wedge-shaped and cylindrical conductors, provided the geometry is sufficiently asymmetric, that is, either the wedge is sufficiently sharp or the atom is sufficiently far from the cylinder.
Like Casimirs original force between conducting plates in vacuum, Casimir forces are usually attractive. But repulsive Casimir forces can be achieved in special circumstances. These might prove useful in nanotechnology. We give examples of when repulsive quantum vacuum forces can arise with conducting materials.
We demonstrate theoretically that one can obtain repulsive Casimir forces and stable nanolevitations by using chiral metamaterials. By extending the Lifshitz theory to treat chiral metamaterials, we find that a repulsive force and a minimum of the interaction energy exist for strong chirality, under realistic frequency dependencies and correct limiting values (for zero and infinite frequencies) of the permittivity, permeability, and chiral coefficients.
We study the influence of stationary axisymmetric spacetimes on Casimir energy. We consider a massive scalar field and analyze its dependence on the apparatus orientation with respect to the dragging direction associated with such spaces. We show that, for an apparatus orientation not considered before in the literature, the Casimir energy can change its sign, producing a repulsive force. As applications, we analyze two specific metrics: one associated with a linear motion of a cylinder and a circular equatorial motion around a gravitational source described by Kerr geometry.
It is predicted that in force microscopy the quantum fluctuations responsible for the Casimir force can be directly observed as temperature-independent force fluctuations having spectral density $9pi/(40ln(4/e)) hbar delta k$, where $hbar$ is Plancks constant and $delta k$ is the observed change in spring constant as the microscope tip approaches a sample. For typical operating parameters the predicted force noise is of order $10^{-18}$ Newton in one Hertz of bandwidth. The Second Law is respected via the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. For small tip-sample separations the cantilever damping is predicted to increase as temperature is reduced, a behavior that is reminiscent of the Kondo effect.