Casimir forces on a silicon micromechanical chip
Name
Johnson_Casimir forces.pdf
Size
933.1 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c7801a59d6c381c6c5916f57da1af98e
Author(s)
Zou, J.
Marcet, Z.
Kravchenko, I. I.
Lu, T.
Bao, Y.
Chan, H. B.
Rodriguez, Alejandro
Reid, McMahon Thomas Homer
McCauley, Alexander Patrick
Johnson, Steven G
Date Issued
May 2013
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Zou, J. et al. “Casimir Forces on a Silicon Micromechanical Chip.” Nature Communications 4 (2013): 1845.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Quantum fluctuations give rise to van der Waals and Casimir forces that dominate the interaction between electrically neutral objects at sub-micron separations. Under the trend of miniaturization, such quantum electrodynamical effects are expected to play an important role in micro- and nano-mechanical devices. Nevertheless, utilization of Casimir forces on the chip level remains a major challenge because all experiments so far require an external object to be manually positioned close to the mechanical element. Here by integrating a force-sensing micromechanical beam and an electrostatic actuator on a single chip, we demonstrate the Casimir effect between two micromachined silicon components on the same substrate. A high degree of parallelism between the two near-planar interacting surfaces can be achieved because they are defined in a single lithographic step. Apart from providing a compact platform for Casimir force measurements, this scheme also opens the possibility of tailoring the Casimir force using lithographically defined components of non-conventional shapes.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2842
