Measurement of the temperature dependence of the Casimir-Polder force.

Rabi Interferometry and Sensitive Measurement of the Casimir-Polder Force with Ultra-Cold Gases

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 MachZehnder since it does not require dynamical beam-splitting/recombination processes. As an application we pro...

Casimir-polder Forces in the Presence of the Cosmic Photon Heat Bath

We study the effect of a photon background at finite temperature T on the Van der Waals interactions among neutral bodies. It turns out that the long-range Casimir-Polder force is unaffected for distances much less than T −1 and strongly enhanced for distances much above T −1 .

ar X iv : 1 00 3 . 12 61 v 1 [ qu an t - ph ] 5 M ar 2 01 0 Temperature - invariant Casimir – Polder forces despite large thermal photon numbers

We demonstrate that Casimir–Polder potentials can be entirely independent of temperature even when allowing for the thermal photon numbers to become large at the relevant molecular transition frequencies. This statement holds for potentials that are due to low-energy transitions of a molecule placed near a plane metal surface. For a molecule in an energy eigenstate, the temperature-invariance i...

Matter-screened Casimir force and Casimir-Polder force in planar structures

Using a recently developed theory of the Casimir force (Raabe C and Welsch D-G 2005 Phys. Rev. A 71 013814), we calculate the force that acts on a plate in front of a planar wall and the force that acts on the plate in the case where the plate is part of matter that fills the space in front of the wall. We show that in the limit of a dielectric plate whose permittivity is close to unity, the fo...

Measurement of the Casimir-Polder force.