UC Santa Cruz                     Condensed Matter Seminar                       14 January 2011

Manipulating Fluctuation-Induced Forces

Mehran Kardar

Thosten Emig, Noah Graham, Robert Jaffe

Jamal Rahi, Mohammad Maghrebi


Outline

I.       Casimir force in QED: Theory, Experiment, & Application                                          

II.      Thermal Casimir force: critical fluctuations, superfluid films                                

III.     Repulsion? Boundary effects (fluids, metamaterials, ...); and Shapes (spheres, pistons, ...)                          

IV.    Scattering approach:  Formalism; exactly solvable shapes (sphere, cylinder, knife-edge, wedge, cone, ...)       

V.     Earnshaw's theorem in electrostatics and for fluctuation-induced forces

VI.     Out of equilibrium: Radiation pressure, temperature differences