Tuesday, November 6, 2012

1211.0603 (Zhiying Zhu et al.)

Temperature-alterable thermal Casimir-Polder forces on polarizable
molecules
   [PDF]

Zhiying Zhu, Hongwei Yu, Bin Wang
We demonstrate that the thermal Casimir-Polder forces on molecules near a conducting surface whose transition wavelengths are comparable to the molecule-surface separation are dependent on the ambient temperature and molecular polarization and they can even be changed from attractive to repulsive via varying the temperature across a threshold value for anisotropically polarizable molecules. Remarkably, this attractive-to-repulsive transition may be realized at room temperature. Let us note that the predicted repulsion is essentially a nonequilibrium effect since the force we calculated on a ground-state (or an excited-stated) molecule actually contains the contribution of the absorption (or emission) of thermal photons.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.0603

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