Casimir experiments showing saturation effects

Abstract

We address several different Casimir experiments where theory and experiment disagree. First out is the classical Casimir force measurement between two metal half spaces; here both in the form of the torsion pendulum experiment by Lamoreaux and in the form of the Casimir pressure measurement between a gold sphere and a gold plate as performed by Decca et al.; theory predicts a large negative thermal correction, absent in the high precision experiments. The third experiment is the measurement of the Casimir force between a metal plate and a laser irradiated semiconductor membrane as performed by Chen et al.; the change in force with laser intensity is larger than predicted by theory. The fourth experiment is the measurement of the Casimir force between an atom and a wall in the form of the measurement by Obrecht et al. of the change in oscillation frequency of a 87 Rb Bose-Einstein condensate trapped to a fused silica wall; the change is smaller than predicted by theory. We show that saturation effects can explain the discrepancies between theory and experiment observed in all these cases.

10 pages, 11 figures

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• Impact of surface imperfections on the Casimir force for lenses of centimeter-size curvature radii
• Quantum Thermal Machines Fuelled by Vacuum Forces
• Possibility to measure thermal effects in the Casimir force
• Electromagnetic normal modes and Casimir effects in layered structures
• Casimir entropy and nonlocal response functions to the off-shell quantum fluctuations
• The Casimir force between a microfabricated elliptic cylinder and a plate
• Probing the non-Planckian spectrum of thermal radiation in a micron-sized cavity with a spin-polarized atomic beam