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

References in corpus (5)

• New approach to the thermal Casimir force between real metals
• High-multipolar effects on the Casimir force: the non-retarded limit
• High-Multipolar Effects on Dispersive Forces
• Beyond the simple Proximity Force Approximation: geometrical effects on the non-retarded Casimir interaction
• Saturation effects in experiments on the thermal Casimir effect