UCLA                                Physics Colloquium                       November 19, 2015

Levitation by Casimir Forces in and out of equilibrium


Summary

I.       Casimir force in QED:       

red ball High precision experimental precision achieved with scanning probes                        

      yellow ball Applications require control of this force, and its shape dependence

II.      Thermal Casimir force:   

red ball Critical Casimir force observed for colloids in a binary mixture    

III.    Repulsion/Levitation?

yellow ball Metamaterials, las invisibility cloaks:     

yellow ball Geometry: 

IV.   Earnshaw's theorem:       The Castle      

 red ball No levitation is possible with electrostatic interactions:  

red ball No levitation is possible with Casimir forces with dielectric composites: 

V.   Thermal nonequilibrium: Breakdown of classical "Stefan-Bolzmann" law

yellow ball Near field heat transfer:     yellow ball Radiation anisotropy: 

VI.    Thermal nonequilibrium:

 yellow ball Force, propulsion:     yellow ball Levitation:         

VII.     Dynamic phenomena

yellow ball A rotating dielectric will slow down in vacuum: leftarrow


Acknowledgments

Thosten Emig, Giuseppe Bimonte, Noah Graham, Robert Jaffe

Ramin Golestanian, Mark Hertzberg

Jamal Rahi, Mohammad Maghrebi

Vlad Golyk, Matthias Krüger