Experimental investigation of the Casimir effect with non-trivial boundary conditions
Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)Abstract
During the past decade, there have been many experimental demonstrations of the attractive Casimir force between two metal surfaces in vacuum. While high precision experiments have been performed for this case, little work has been done between metallic objects in fluids, dielectric objects, or optically anisotropic materials. For materials with suitably chosen dielectric response functions, repulsive quantum electrodynamical (QED) forces can arise. Preliminary experiments demonstrating this effect will be presented. Using an atomic force set up we have also measured the force between a gold sphere and a BiSCCO (a layered cuprate with high Tc) surface. The atomic flatness of the latter material and its optical properties lead to a significant reduction of the force compared to the case of a Au Sphere/Au plate. In addition, optically anisotropic materials can lead to a QED toque resulting from the modification of the boundary conditions of the electromagnetic fluctuations between the materials. We will discuss experiments to detect these phenomena.