Comment on "Anomalies in electrostatic calibration for the measurement of the Casimir force in a sphere-plane geometry"

Abstract

Recently W. J. Kim, M. Brown-Hayes, D. A. R. Dalvit, J. H. Brownell, and R. Onofrio [Phys. Rev. A, v.78, 036102(R) (2008)] performed electrostatic calibrations for a plane plate above a centimeter-size spherical lens at separations down to 20-30 nm and observed "anomalous behavior". It was found that the gradient of the electrostatic force does not depend on separation as predicted on the basis of a pure Coulombian contribution. Some hypotheses which could potentially explain the deviation from the expected behavior were considered, and qualitative arguments in favor of the influence of patch surface potentials were presented. We demonstrate that for the large lenses at separations of a few tens nanometers from the plate, the electrostatic force law used by the authors is not applicable due to possible deviations of the mechanically polished and ground lens surface from a perfect spherical shape. A model is proposed which explains the observed "anomalous behavior" using the standard Coulombian force.

9 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Novel constraints on light elementary particles and extra-dimensional physics from the Casimir effect
• Measurement of the Casimir force between a gold sphere and silicon surface with nanoscale trench arrays
• Control of the Casimir force by the modification of dielectric properties with light
• Demonstration of optically modulated dispersion forces
• Anomalies in electrostatic calibrations for the measurement of the Casimir force in a sphere-plane geometry
• Demonstration of the difference Casimir force for samples with different charge carrier densities
• Experimental test for the conductivity properties from the Casimir force between metal and semiconductor
• Kramers-Kronig relations for plasma-like permittivities and the Casimir force
• Quantitative non contact dynamic Casimir force measurements

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