Critical Casimir forces steered by patterned substrates

Abstract

Among the various kinds of effective forces in soft matter, the spatial range and the direction of the so-called critical Casimir force - which is generated by the enhanced thermal fluctuations close to a continuous phase transition - can be controlled and reversibly modified to an uncommonly large extent. In particular, minute temperature changes of the fluid solvent, which provides the near-critical thermal fluctuations, lead to a significant change of the range and strength of the effective interaction among the solute particles. This feature allows one to control, e.g., the aggregation of colloidal dispersions or the spatial distribution of colloids in the presence of chemically or topographically patterned substrates. The spatial direction of the effective force acting on a solute particle depends only on the surface properties of the immersed particles and can be spatially modulated by suitably patterned surfaces. These critical Casimir forces are largely independent of the specific materials properties of both the solvent and the confining surfaces. This characteristic universality of critical phenomena allows systematic and quantitative theoretical studies of the critical Casimir forces in terms of suitable representative and simplified models. Here we highlight recent theoretical and experimental advances concerning critical Casimir forces with a particular emphasis on the numerous possibilities of controlling these forces by substrate patterns.

Invited highlight for the special issue of Soft Matter dedicated to the International Soft Matter Conference 2010

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Cited by in corpus (30)

• Nonadditivity of Critical Casimir Forces
• Boundary critical behavior of the three-dimensional Heisenberg universality class
• The thermodynamic Casimir force: A Monte Carlo study of the crossover between the ordinary and the normal surface universality class
• Boundary Criticality of the 3D O($N$) Model: From Normal to Extraordinary
• Critical Casimir Effect: Exact Results
• Many-body effects for critical Casimir forces
• Electrostatic interactions in critical solvents
• Casimir force induced by imperfect Bose gas
• Tunable critical Casimir forces counteract Casimir-Lifshitz attraction
• Critical Casimir forces between homogeneous and chemically striped surfaces
• Critical adsorption and critical Casimir forces in the canonical ensemble
• Ensemble dependence of Critical Casimir Forces in Films with Dirichlet Boundary Conditions
• Casimir force in the O(n -> infinity) model with free boundary conditions
• Three-body critical Casimir forces
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• Casimir force in the rotor model with twisted boundary conditions
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• The ordinary surface universality class of the three-dimensional O($N$) model
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• Casimir Force in a Model with Strongly Adsorbing Competing Walls: Analytical Results
• Viscosity of a sheared correlated (near-critical) model fluid in confinement
• Critical Casimir forces between planar and crenellated surfaces
• Casimir effect between pinned particles in two-dimensional jammed systems
• Exact results for the Casimir force of a three-dimensional model of relativistic Bose gas in a film geometry
• Surface critical behavior of the three-dimensional O(3) model
• Boundary operator product expansion coefficients of the three-dimensional Ising universality class