Rectification of the lateral Casimir force in a vibrating non-contact rack and pinion

Abstract

The nonlinear dynamics of a cylindrical pinion that is kept at a distance from a vibrating rack is studied, and it is shown that the lateral Casimir force between the two corrugated surfaces can be rectified. The effects of friction and external load are taken into account and it is shown that the pinion can do work against loads of up to a critical value, which is set by the amplitude of the lateral Casimir force. We present a phase diagram for the rectified motion that could help its experimental investigations, as the system exhibits a chaotic behavior in a large part of the parameter space.

References in corpus (2)

• The Casimir effect for a sphere and a cylinder in front of plane and corrections to the proximity force theorem
• Non-contact rack and pinion powered by the lateral Casimir force

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• Lateral Casimir force between deeply corrugated dielectric and metallic plates