Critical Casimir Force between Inhomogeneous Boundaries

Abstract

To study the critical Casimir force between chemically structured boundaries immersed in a binary mixture at its demixing transition, we consider a strip of Ising spins subject to alternating fixed spin boundary conditions. The system exhibits a boundary induced phase transition as function of the relative amount of up and down boundary spins. This transition is associated with a sign change of the asymptotic force and a diverging correlation length that sets the scale for the crossover between different universal force amplitudes. Using conformal field theory and a mapping to Majorana fermions, we obtain the universal scaling function of this crossover, and the force at short distances.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (9)

• The Casimir effect: from quantum to critical fluctuations
• Critical Casimir forces in colloidal suspensions on chemically patterned surfaces
• Critical Casimir Effect in superfluid wetting films
• Critical Casimir effect for colloids close to chemically patterned substrates
• Trapping colloids near chemical stripes via critical Casimir forces
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• Critical Casimir forces in the presence of random surface fields
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• Modified Szego-Widom Asymptotics for Block Toeplitz Matrices with Zero Modes
• Conformal field theory of critical Casimir forces between surfaces with alternating boundary conditions in two dimensions
• Casimir interaction of rod-like particles in a two-dimensional critical system
• Manipulation and amplification of the Casimir force through surface fields using helicity