On the fluctuation of thermal van der Waals forces due to dipole fluctuations

Abstract

Fluctuations of the thermal or classical component of the van der Waals force between two dielectric slabs, modelled as an ensemble of polarizable dipoles which interact via the usual electrostatic dipole-dipole interaction, are evaluated. In the model the instantaneous force is a deterministic function of the dipole configurations in the slabs and its fluctuations are purely due to dipole fluctuations (no background thermal fluctuations of the electromagnetic field are considered). The average of the force and its variance are computed. The fluctuations of the force exhibit normal thermodynamic scaling in that they are proportional to the area of the two plates, and even more importantly, do not depend on any microscopic cut-off in the theory. The average and the variance of the thermal van der Waals forces give a unique fingerprint of these fluctuation interactions.

5 pages Revtex

References in corpus (5)

• Fluctuations of the Casimir-like force between two membrane inclusions
• Drag forces on inclusions in classical fields with dissipative dynamics
• Thermal Casimir drag in fluctuating classical fields
• Out of equilibrium thermal Casimir effect in a model polarizable material
• Stochastic Quantization and Casimir Forces

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Anharmonic particles: suppressing van der Waals forces by an external field
• Hydrodynamic stress correlations in fluid films driven by stochastic surface forcing
• Fluctuations of the critical Casimir force