What is credible and what is incredible in the measurements of the Casimir force

Abstract

We comment on progress in measurements of the Casimir force and discuss what is the actual reliability of different experiments. In this connection a more rigorous approach to the usage of such concepts as accuracy, precision, and measure of agreement between experiment and theory, is presented. We demonstrate that all measurements of the Casimir force employing spherical lenses with centimeter-size curvature radii are fundamentally flawed due to the presence of bubbles and pits on their surfaces. The commonly used formulation of the proximity force approximation is shown to be inapplicable for centimeter-size lenses. New expressions for the Casimir force are derived taking into account surface imperfections. Uncontrollable deviations of the Casimir force from the values predicted using the assumption of perfect sphericity vary by a few tens of percent within the separation region from 1 to $3\mu$m. This makes impractical further use of centimeter-size lenses in experiments on measuring the Casimir force.

14 pages, 2 figures, minor changes are made in accordance with the published version

References in corpus (11)

• Observation of the thermal Casimir force
• 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
• Comment on "Anomalies in electrostatic calibration for the measurement of the Casimir force in a sphere-plane geometry"
• Impact of surface imperfections on the Casimir force for lenses of centimeter-size curvature radii
• Application of the proximity force approximation to gravitational and Yukawa-type forces
• Results from electrostatic calibrations for measuring the Casimir force in the cylinder-plane geometry
• Reply to "Comment on 'Anomalies in electrostatic calibrations for the measurement of the Casimir force in a sphere-plane geometry'"
• Possibility to measure thermal effects in the Casimir force
• Macroscopic quantum vacuum and microscopic gravitation

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Constraints on corrections to Newtonian gravity from two recent measurements of the Casimir interaction between metallic surfaces
• Classical limit of the Casimir interaction for thin films with applications to graphene
• Comparison between experiment and theory for the thermal Casimir force
• Constraints on non-Newtonian gravity and light elementary particles from measurements of the Casimir force by means of dynamic AFM
• New constraints on the Yukawa-type corrections to Newtonian gravity at short separations