Temperature-dependent Casimir-Polder forces on polarizable molecules

Abstract

We demonstrate that the thermal Casimir-Polder forces on molecules near a conducting surface whose transition wavelengths are comparable to the molecule-surface separation are dependent on the ambient temperature and molecular polarization and they can even be changed from attractive to repulsive via varying the temperature across a threshold value for anisotropically polarizable molecules. Remarkably, this attractive-to-repulsive transition may be realized at room temperature. Let us note that the predicted repulsion is essentially a nonequilibrium effect since the force we calculated on a ground-state (or an excited-stated) molecule actually contains the contribution of the absorption (or emission) of thermal photons.

10 pages, 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Resonance interaction energy between two accelerated identical atoms in a coaccelerated frame and the Unruh effect
• Spontaneous excitation of a static atom in a thermal bath in cosmic string spacetime
• Energy shift and Casimir-Polder force for an atom out of thermal equilibrium near a dielectric substrate
• Interplay of curvature and temperature in the Casimir-Polder interaction
• Casimir-Polder force for a polarizable molecule near a dielectric substrate out of thermal equilibrium