We present a theoretical calculation of the pull-in control in capacitive micro switches actuated by Casimir forces, using external magnetic fields. The external magnetic fields induces an optical anisotropy due to the excitation of magneto plasmons, that reduces the Casimir force. The calculations are performed in the Voigt configuration, and the results show that as the magnetic field increases the system becomes more stable. The detachment length for a cantilever is also calculated for a cantilever, showing that it increases with increasing magnetic field. At the pull-in separation, the stiffness of the system decreases with increasing magnetic field.
In this paper we present a theoretical calculation of the acoustic Casimir pressure in a model micro system. Unlike the quantum case, the acoustic Casimir pressure can be made attractive or repulsive depending on the frequency bandwidth of the acoustic noise. As a case study, a one degree of freedom simple-lumped system in an acoustic resonant cavity is considered. We show that the frequency bandwidth of the acoustic field can be tuned to increase the stability in existing microswitch systems by selecting the sign of the force. The acoustic intensity and frequency bandwidth are introduced as t…
The Casimir Force, a quantum mechanical effect, has been observed in several microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) platforms. Due to its extreme sensitivity to the separation of two objects, the Casimir Force has been proposed as an excellent avenue for quantum metrology. Practical application, however, is challenging due to attractive forces leading to stiction and failure of the device, called Casimir pull-in. In this work, we design and simulate a Casimir-driven metrology platform, where a time-delay based parametric amplification technique is developed to achieve a steady state and avoid p…
In this paper we review the role of magneto plasmon polaritons in the Casimir force calculations. By applying an external constant magnetic field a strong optical anisotropy is induced on two parallel slabs reducing the reflectivity and thus the Casimir force. As the external magnetic field increases, the Casimir force decreases. Thus, with an an external magnetic field the Casimir force can be controlled.The calculations are done in the Voigt configuration where the magnetic field is parallel to the slabs. In this configuration the reflection coefficients for TE and TM modes do not show mode …
Casimir-electrostatic pull-in in nanoelectromechanical actuators: Differentiable design sensitivities and the damping-dependent collapse boundary
Nantong University（南通大学）；Kuban State University（库班国立大学）；Joint-Stock Company “Center for Research and Development”（联合股份公司“研发中⼼”）；Shenzhen MSU-BIT University（深圳北理莫斯科大学）
In the work, the thermal and vacuum fluctuation is predicted capable of generating a Casimir thrust force on a rotating chiral particle, which will push or pull the particle along the rotation axis. The Casimir thrust force comes from two origins: i) the rotation-induced symmetry-breaking in the vacuum and thermal fluctuation and ii) the chiral cross-coupling between electric and magnetic fields and dipoles, which can convert the vacuum spin angular momentum (SAM) to the vacuum force. Using the fluctuation dissipation theorem (FDT), we derive the analytical expressions for the vacuum thrust fo…
The moving-mirror problem is microscopically formulated without invoking the external boundary conditions. The moving mirrors are described by the quantized matter field interacting with the photon field, forming dynamical cavity polaritons: photons in the cavity are dressed by electrons in the moving mirrors. The effective Hamiltonian for the polariton is derived, and corrections to the results based on the external boundary conditions are discussed.
Atom-surface forces using excited states have a host of compelling applications, including repulsive and lateral forces. However, such states can be fragile and difficult to prepare. Here we report an explicit normal-mode based calculation of the Casimir-Polder potential between a ground-state atom and a non-dispersive surface in the presence of an external quantised field. The potential we derive shares some features with that of excited-state Casimir-Polder forces even though we consider a ground-state atom. Our work provides a physically transparent and intuitive picture of driven Casimir-P…
In this article, we rigorously analyze the effects of the dispersion forces (Casimir and van der Waals forces) on a nano-optomechanical device based on a silicon waveguide and a silicon dioxide substrate, surrounded by air and driven by optical forces. The dispersion forces are calculated using a modified Lifshitz theory, in order to take into account the device thickness and material s dielectric permittivities, which are obtained from experimental optical data and validated by means of a rigorous 3D FDTD simulation. We also take into account the mechanical nonlinearity of the waveguide, whic…
A time-dependent Casimir-Polder force is shown to arise during the time evolution of a partially dressed two-level atom. The partially dressed atom is obtained by a rapid change of an atomic parameter such as its transition frequency, due to the action of some external agent. The electromagnetic field fluctuations around the atom, averaged over the solid angle for simplicity, are calculated as a function of time, and it is shown that the interaction energy with a second atom yields a dynamical Casimir-Polder potential between the two atoms.
By considering the effect of diffusion on the external electric field response of charge carriers in metals and semiconductors, it is shown that the finite temperature correction proposed Bostrom and Sernelius requires substantial modification, and there is no large correction as suggested for good conductors. The apparent violation of the Third Law of Thermodynamics of the various proposed temperature corrections to the Casimir force is also resolved. Finally, the effect of Debye screening on electrostatic calibrations between pure germanium surfaces is calculated
We investigate the dispersive Casimir-Polder interaction between a Rubidium atom and a suspended graphene sheet subjected to an external magnetic field B. We demonstrate that this concrete physical system allows for an unprecedented control of dispersive interactions at micro and nanoscales. Indeed, we show that the application of an external magnetic field can induce a 80% reduction of the Casimir-Polder energy relative to its value without the field. We also show that sharp discontinuities emerge in the Casimir-Polder interaction energy for certain values of the applied magnetic field at low…
In the presence of an external field, the imposition of specific boundary conditions can lead to interesting new manifestations of the Casimir effect. In particular, it is shown here that even a single conducting plate may experience a non-zero force due to vacuum fluctuations. The origins of this force lie in the change induced by the external potential in the density of available quantum states.
We calculate the Casimir-Polder intermolecular potential using an effective Hamiltonian recently introduced. We show that the potential can be expressed in terms of the dynamical polarizabilities of the two atoms and the equal-time spatial correlation of the electric field in the vacuum state. This gives support to an interesting physical model recently proposed in the literature, where the potential is obtained from the classical interaction between the instantaneous atomic dipoles induced and correlated by the vacuum fluctuations. Also, the results obtained suggest a more general validity of…
Emphasizing first the utility of the generalized Fresnel coefficients in the theory of the Casimir effect in planar cavities, we complement our previous discussion of the ordinary Casimir force on and the Casimir stress in a metal (plasma) slab in a planar cavity. We demonstrate strong dependence of the Casimir stress in a thin slab on properties of the bounding medium in the symmetric Lifshitz configuration. Contrary to this, the stress in a thick slab gradually becomes insensitive on external boundary conditions. We also consider the position dependence of the Casimir force on and stress in …
We consider the nonstationary circuit QED architecture, where a single artificial two-level atom interacts with a cavity field mode under external modulation of one or more system parameters. Two different approaches are employed to study the effects of Markovian dissipation on modulation-induced transitions between the atom-field dressed states: the standard master equation of Quantum Optics and the recently formulated dressed-picture master equation. We estimate the associated transition rates and show that photon generation from vacuum ("dynamical Casimir effect", DCE) and coherent photon a…
We recall and generalize the analysis of the output of the so-called balanced homodyne detectors. The most important feature of these detectors is their ability to quantify the vacuum fluctuations of the electric field, that is expectation values of products of (quantum-) electric-field operators. More precisely, the output of BHDs provides information on the one- and two-point functions of arbitrary states of quantum fields. We generalize the analysis of the response of BHDs to the case of quantum fields under influence of static external conditions such as cavities or polarizable media. By r…
We consider the quantum Rabi model with external time modulation of the atomic frequency, which can be employed to create excitations from the vacuum state of the electromagnetic field as a consequence of the dynamical Casimir effect. Excitations can also be systematically subtracted from the atom-field system by suitably adjusting the modulation frequency, in the so-called anti-dynamical Casimir effect (ADCE). We evaluate the quantum thermodynamical work and show that a realistic out-of-equilibrium finite-time protocol harnessing ADCE allows for work extraction from the system, whose amount c…
Role of the Casimir force in the capacitive radio-frequency microelectromechanical switches
Central Astronomical Observatory at Pulkovo of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院普尔科沃中央天文台）；Peter the Great Saint Petersburg Polytechnic University（彼得大帝圣彼得堡理工大学）
We develop a model of a quantum field confined within a cavity with a movable wall where the position of the wall is quantized. We obtain a full description of the dynamics of both the quantum field and the confining wall depending on the initial state of the whole system. Both the reaction and back-reaction of the field on the wall, and the wall on the field, can be taken into account, as well as external driving forces on both the cavity and the wall. The model exactly reproduces the resonant cavity mode stimulation due to the periodic motion of the mirror (dynamical Casimir effect), as well…
We study the Topological Casimir effect, in which extra vacuum energy emerges as a result of the topological features of the theory, rather than due to the conventional fluctuations of the physical propagating degrees of freedom. We compute the corresponding topological term in quantum Maxwell theory defined on a compact manifold. Numerically, the topological effect is much smaller than the conventional Casimir effect. However, we argue that the Topological Casimir Effect is highly sensitive to an external magnetic field, which may help to discriminate it from the conventional Casimir effect. …
Based on the theory of macroscopic quantum electrodynamics, we generalize the expression of the Casimir force for nonreciprocal media. The essential ingredient of this result is the Green's tensor between two nonreciprocal semi-infinite slabs including a reflexion matrix with four coefficients that mixes optical polarizations. This Green's tensor does not obey Lorentz's reciprocity and thus violates time-reversal symmetry. The general result for the Casimir force is analyzed in the retarded and nonretarded limits, concentrating on the influences arising from reflections with or without change …
We develop a microscopic toy model for Cavity dynamical Casimir effect (DCE), namely, the photon generation from vacuum due to a nonstationary dielectric slab in a fixed single mode cavity. We represent the slab by $N\gg 1$ noninteracting two-level atoms coupled to the field via the standard dipole interaction. We show that the DCE is contained implicitly in the light-matter interaction Hamiltonian when its parameters are externally prescribed functions of time. We also predict several new phenomena, such as saturation of the photon growth due to effective Kerr nonlinearity, generation of pair…
We present and investigate an analogue model for a controllable photon geberation via the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) in a cavity containing a degenerate optical amplifier (OPA) which is pumed by an amplitude-modulated field. The time modulation of the pump field in the model OPA system is equivalent to a periodic modulation of the cavity length, which is responsible for the generation of the Casimir radiation. By taking into account the rapidly oscillating terms of the modulation frequency, the effects of the corresponding counter-rotating terms (CRTs) on the analogue Casimir radiation eme…
We have reviewed the Comment of Geyer et al. [arXiv:0708.1548] concerning our recent work [Phys. Rev. A 75, 060102 (R) (2007)], and while we disagree with their criticisms, we acknowledge them for giving us the opportunity to add interesting addition material and a more detailed description of our experiment. We describe further our calculation and explain why a more sophisticated model is not warranted. We also present detailed experiments on the effects of electrostatic forces in our measurements and show that the contribution due to work function differences is small and that the residual e…
We study the Casimir effect in a system composed of two Weyl semimetals (WSMs) separated by a gap filled with a chiral medium. We calculate the optical response of the material to chiral photons in order to calculate the Casimir force. We find that if the medium between the two WSMs is a Faraday material, a repulsive Casimir force can be obtained, and for realistic experimental parameters its magnitude can be greatly enhanced at short distances of a few microns Moreover, in the system under consideration various parameters can be modified. Some of them are intrinsic to the materials employed (…
Magnon excitation in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate by a driven magnetic field is shown to have a close analogy with the dynamical Casimir effect. A time-dependent external magnetic field amplifies quantum fluctuations in the magnetic ground state of the condensate, leading to magnetization of the system. The magnetization occurs in a direction perpendicular to the magnetic field breaking the rotation symmetry. This phenomenon is numerically demonstrated and the excited quantum field is shown to be squeezed.
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…
We study the Casimir-Lifshitz force and the radiative heat transfer in a system consisting of three bodies held at three independent temperatures and immersed in a thermal environment, the whole system being in a stationary configuration out of thermal equilibrium. The theory we develop is valid for arbitrary bodies, i.e. for any set of temperatures, dielectric and geometrical properties, and describes each body by means of its scattering operators. For the three-body system we provide a closed-form unified expression of the radiative heat transfer and of the Casimir-Lifshitz force (both in an…
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 act…
We show that Rabi oscillations of a degenerate fermionic or bosonic gas trapped in a double-well potential can be exploited for the interferometric measurement of external forces at micrometer length scales. The Rabi interferometer is less sensitive, but easier to implement, than the Mach-Zehnder since it does not require dynamical beam-splitting/recombination processes. As an application we propose a measurement of the Casimir-Polder force acting between the atoms and a dielectric surface. We find that even if the interferometer is fed with a coherent state of relatively small number of atoms…
The lateral Casimir force is employed to propose a design for a potentially wear-proof rack and pinion with no contact, which can be miniaturized to nano-scale. The robustness of the design is studied by exploring the relation between the pinion velocity and the rack velocity in the different domains of the parameter space. The effects of friction and added external load are also examined. It is shown that the device can hold up extremely high velocities, unlike what the general perception of the Casimir force as a weak interaction might suggest.
We want to study the Casimir effect for a single conducting microscopic cylindrical cavity. The mathematical technique is based on the Green function of the geometry of the inside of the cavity, and the integral regularization is based on the plasma frequency cutoff for real conductors. Using the symmetric electromagnetic energy-momentum tensor, in terms of four potential, the total Casimir energy for the inside of the Cavity is calculated. Neglecting the contribution of the external (outside of the cavity) Casimir energy based on the reason recently presented in [1], the forces experienced by…
In this article we compute the Casimir force between two finite-width mirrors at finite temperature, working in a simplified model in 1+1 dimensions. The mirrors, considered as dissipative media, are modeled by a continuous set of harmonic oscillators which in turn are coupled to an external environment at thermal equilibrium. The calculation of the Casimir force is performed in the framework of the theory of quantum open systems. It is shown that the Casimir interaction has two different contributions: the usual radiation pressure from vacuum, which is obtained for ideal mirrors without dissi…
The Casimir force is a universal interaction induced by electromagnetic quantum fluctuations between any types of objects. The expansion of the graphene family by adding silicene, germanene, and stanene, 2D allotropes of Si, Ge, and Sn, lands itself as a platform to probe Dirac-like physics in honeycomb staggered systems in such a ubiquitous interaction. We discover Casimir force phase transitions between these staggered 2D materials induced by the complex interplay between Dirac physics, spin-orbit coupling, and externally applied fields. In particular, we find that the interaction energy exp…
We study the Bell's inequality violation by dynamical Casimir radiation with pseudospin measurement. We consider a circuit quantum electrodynamical set-up where a relativistically moving mirror is simulated by variable external magnetic flux in a SQUID terminating a superconducting-microwave waveguide. We analytically obtain expectation values of the Bell operator optimized with respect to channel orientations, in terms of the system parameters. We consider the effects of local noise in the microwave field modes, asymmetry between the field modes resulting from nonzero detuning, and signal los…
We show that an isotropic dipolar particle in the vicinity of a substrate made of nonreciprocal plasmonic materials can experience a lateral Casimir force and torque when the particle's temperature differs from that of the slab and the environment. We connect the existence of the lateral force to the asymmetric dispersion of nonreciprocal surface polaritons and the existence of the lateral torque to the spin-momentum locking of such surface waves. Using the formalism of fluctuational electrodynamics, we show that the features of lateral force and torque should be experimentally observable usin…
We predict a repulsive Casimir-Polder-type dispersion interaction between a single neutron and a metal or dielectric surface. We consider a scenario where a single neutron is subject to an external magnetic field. Due to its intrinsic magnetic moment, the neutron then forms a magnetisable two-level system which can exchange virtual photons with a nearby surface. The resulting dispersion interaction between a purely magnetic object (neutron) and a purely electric one (surface) is found to be repulsive, in contrast to the typical attractive interaction between electric objects. Its magnitude is …
We consider here, a two-atom system is uniformly moving through a circular ring at an ultra-relativistic speed and weakly interacting with common external fields. The vacuum fluctuations of the quantum fields generate the entanglement between the atoms. Hence an effective energy shift is originated, which depends on the inter-atomic distance. This is commonly known as resonance Casimir-Polder interaction (RCPI). It is well known that, for a linearly accelerated system coupled with a massless scalar field, we get a thermal response when the local inertial approximation is valid. On the contrary…
Vacuum Torque Without Anisotropy: Switchable Casimir Torque Between Altermagnets
Tsung-Dao Lee Institute & School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交大李政道研究所与物理与天文学院）；Shanghai Branch, Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室上海分部）
We report on measurements of forces acting between two conducting surfaces in a spherical-plane configuration in the 35 nm-1 micrometer separation range. The measurements are obtained by performing electrostatic calibrations followed by a residual analysis after subtracting the electrostatic-dependent component. We find in all runs optimal fitting of the calibrations for exponents smaller than the one predicted by electrostatics for an ideal sphere-plane geometry. We also find that the external bias potential necessary to minimize the electrostatic contribution depends on the sphere-plane dist…
We discuss the Casimir effect in heterotic string theory. This is done by considering a Z_2 twist acting on one external compact direction and three internal coordinates. The hyperplanes fixed by the orbifold generator G realize the two infinite parallel plates. For the latter to behave as "conducting material", we implement in a modular invariant way the projection (1-G)/2 on the spectrum running in the vacuum-to-vacuum amplitude at one-loop. Hence, the relevant projector to account for the Casimir effect is orthogonal to that commonly used in string orbifold models, which is (1+G)/2. We find…
Charged massive matter fields of spin 0 and 1/2 are quantized in the presence of an external uniform magnetic field in a spatial region bounded by two parallel plates. The most general set of boundary conditions at the plates, that is required by mathematical consistency and the self-adjointness of the Hamiltonian operator, is employed. The vacuum fluctuations of the matter field in the case of the magnetic field orthogonal to the plates are analyzed, and it is shown that the pressure from the vacuum onto the plates is positive and independent of the boundary condition, as well as of the dista…
We review the framework we and our collaborators have developed for the study of one-loop quantum corrections to extended field configurations in renormalizable quantum field theories. We work in the continuum, transforming the standard Casimir sum over modes into a sum over bound states and an integral over scattering states weighted by the density of states. We express the density of states in terms of phase shifts, allowing us to extract divergences by identifying Born approximations to the phase shifts with low order Feynman diagrams. Once isolated in Feynman diagrams, the divergences are …
We study novel types of contributions to the partition function of the Maxwell system defined on a small compact manifold. These contributions, often not addressed in the perturbative treatment with physical photons, emerge as a result of tunneling transitions between topologically distinct but physically identical vacuum winding states. These new terms give an extra contribution to the Casimir pressure, yet to be measured. We argue that this effect is highly sensitive to a small external electric field, which should be contrasted with the conventional Casimir effect where the vacuum photons a…
This is the first one of a series of papers about zeta regularization of the divergences appearing in the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of several local and global observables in quantum field theory. More precisely we consider a quantized, neutral scalar field on a domain in any spatial dimension, with arbitrary boundary conditions and, possibly, in presence of an external classical potential. We analyze, in particular, the VEV of the stress-energy tensor, the corresponding boundary forces and the total energy, thus taking into account both local and global aspects of the Casimir effect. In …
The Casimir problem is usually posed as the response of a fluctuating quantum field to externally imposed boundary conditions. In reality, however, no interaction is strong enough to enforce a boundary condition on all frequencies of a fluctuating field. We construct a more physical model of the situation by coupling the fluctuating field to a smooth background potential that implements the boundary condition in a certain limit. To study this problem, we develop general new methods to compute renormalized one--loop quantum energies and energy densities. We use analytic properties of scattering…
Recently, we have demonstrated that for a certain class of Casimir-type systems ("devices") the energy of zero-point vacuum fluctuations reaches its global minimum when the device rotates about a certain axis rather than remains static. This rotational vacuum effect may lead to the emergence of permanently rotating objects provided the negative rotational energy of zero-point fluctuations cancels the positive rotational energy of the device itself. In this paper, we show that for massless electrically charged particles the rotational vacuum effect should be drastically (astronomically) enhance…
