Geometry-Induced Casimir Suspension of Oblate Bodies in Fluids
Name
Rodriguez-2013-Geometry-induced Casimir.pdf
Size
573.78 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
28265f4a52c7d4a12241f65626b01702
Author(s)
Rodriguez, Alejandro W.
Reid, M. T. Homer
Intravaia, Francesco
Woolf, Alexander
Dalvit, D. A. R.
Capasso, Federico
Johnson, Steven G.
Date Issued
October 2013
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Rodriguez, Alejandro W. et al. “Geometry-Induced Casimir Suspension of Oblate Bodies in Fluids.” Physical Review Letters 111.18 (2013): n. pag. © 2013 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We predict that a low-permittivity oblate body (disk-shaped object) above a thin metal substrate (plate with a hole) immersed in a fluid of intermediate permittivity will experience a metastable equilibrium (restoring force) near the center of the hole. Stability is the result of a geometry-induced transition in the sign of the force, from repulsive to attractive, that occurs as the disk approaches the hole—in planar or nearly planar geometries, the same material combination yields a repulsive force at all separations, in accordance with the Dzyaloshinskii-Lifshitz-Pitaevskii condition of fluid-induced repulsion between planar bodies. We explore the stability of the system with respect to rotations and lateral translations of the disks and demonstrate interesting transitions (bifurcations) in the rotational stability of the disks as a function of their size. Finally, we consider the reciprocal situation in which the disk-plate materials are interchanged and find that in this case the system also exhibits metastability. The forces in the system are sufficiently large to be observed in experiments and should enable measurements based on the diffusion dynamics of the suspended bodies.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.180402
