Thermal Issues in Casimir Forces Between Conductors and Semiconductors

Abstract

The Casimir effect between metal surfaces has now been well-verified at the few-percent level experimentally. However, the temperature dependence has never been observed in the laboratory, since all experiments are conducted at room temperature. The temperature dependence for the related Casimir-Polder force between an atom and a bulk material has, in contrast, been observed between a BEC and a silica substrate, with the environment and the silica held at different temperatures. There is a controversy about the temperature dependence for the force between metals, having to do with the magnitude of the linear temperature term for both low and high temperature, the latter being most prominent at large distances. There are also related anomalies pertaining to semiconductors. The status of this controversy, and of the relevant experiments, are reviewed in this report.

8 pages, 4 figures, extended version of presentation at Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics, Prague, July 2011. Revision corrects some errors in references and minor typographic errors. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:quant-ph/0605005

References in corpus (13)

• Measurement of the Temperature Dependence of the Casimir-Polder Force
• Novel constraints on light elementary particles and extra-dimensional physics from the Casimir effect
• Control of the Casimir force by the modification of dielectric properties with light
• Casimir-Lifshitz force out of thermal equilibrium
• Gradient of the Casimir force between Au surfaces of a sphere and a plate measured using atomic force microscope in a frequency shift technique
• Demonstration of optically modulated dispersion forces
• Thermal corrections to the Casimir effect
• Thermal Lifshitz Force between Atom and Conductor with Small Density of Carriers
• Contribution of drifting carriers to the Casimir-Lifshitz and Casimir-Polder interactions with semiconductor materials
• Application of the Lifshitz theory to poor conductors
• Casimir energy and entropy between dissipative mirrors
• Microscopic theory of the Casimir force at thermal equilibrium: large-separation asymptotics
• Comparison between experiment and theory for the thermal Casimir force

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• Hide it to see it better: a robust setup to probe the thermal Casimir effect
• Casimir Self-Entropy of an Electromagnetic Thin Sheet
• Casimir Self-Entropy of Nanoparticles with Classical Polarizabilities: Electromagnetic Field Fluctuations
• Exact Casimir interaction of perfectly conducting three-spheres in four euclidean dimensions
• Thermally Excited Quasiparticles in Metals, Dispersion Forces, and the Thermal Anomaly