Direct simulation of critical Casimir forces

Abstract

We present a new Monte Carlo method to calculate Casimir forces acting on objects in a near-critical fluid, considering the two basic cases of a wall and a sphere embedded in a two-dimensional Ising medium. During the simulation, the objects are moved through the system with appropriate statistical weights, and consequently are attracted or repelled from the system boundaries depending on the boundary conditions. The distribution function of the object position is utilized to obtain the residual free energy, or Casimir potential, of the configuration as well as the corresponding Casimir force. The results are in perfect agreement with known exact results. The method can easily be generalized to more complicated geometries, to higher dimensions, and also to colloidal suspensions with many particles.

arXiv comment6 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Collective behavior of colloids due to critical Casimir interactions
• Critical Casimir Effect: Exact Results
• Many-body critical Casimir interactions in colloidal suspensions
• Critical Casimir Interactions Between Spherical Particles in the Presence of the Bulk Ordering Fields
• The square lattice Ising model on the rectangle I: Finite systems
• Critical Casimir force in the presence of random local adsorption preference
• The square lattice Ising model on the rectangle II: Finite-size scaling limit
• Thermodynamic Casimir Effect in Films: the Exchange Cluster Algorithm
• Anisotropic scaling of the two-dimensional Ising model I: the torus
• Line contribution to the critical Casimir force between a homogeneous and a chemically stepped surface
• Critical Casimir force scaling functions of the two-dimensional Ising model at finite aspect ratios
• Sign change in the net force in sphere-plate and sphere-sphere systems immersed in nonpolar critical fluid due to the interplay between the critical Casimir and dispersion van der Waals forces
• The square lattice Ising model on the rectangle III: Hankel and Toeplitz determinants
• Critical Casimir Interactions and Percolation: the quantitative description of critical fluctuations