Search results for " Casimir effect"
showing 3 items of 13 documents
Temperature dependence of the magnetic Casimir-Polder interaction
2009
We analyze the magnetic dipole contribution to atom-surface dispersion forces. Unlike its electrical counterpart, it involves small transition frequencies that are comparable to thermal energy scales. A significant temperature dependence is found near surfaces with a nonzero DC conductivity, leading to a strong suppression of the dispersion force at T > 0. We use thermal response theory for the surface material and discuss both normal metals and superconductors. The asymptotes of the free energy of interaction and of the entropy are calculated analytically over a large range of distances. Near a superconductor, the onset of dissipation at the phase transition strongly changes the interac…
Casimir Polder forces between two accelerating atoms and the Unruh effect
2010
The Casimir-Polder force between two atoms with equal uniform acceleration and separated by a constant distance R is considered. We show that, in the low-acceleration limit, while the near-zone R-6 behavior of the interatomic interaction energy is not changed by the acceleration of the atoms, the far-zone interaction energy decreases as R-5 instead of the well-known R-7 behavior for inertial atoms. Possibility of an indirect detection of the Unruh effect through measurements of the Casimir-Polder force between the two accelerating atoms is also suggested. We also consider a heuristic model for calculating the Casimir-Polder potential energy between the two atoms in the high-acceleration lim…
Les interactiones de Casimir hors d'équilibre : effets dynamiques et thermiques
2016
In this thesis, after an introduction where we briefly present the general context of Casimir physics, we present the results obtained during the PhD. At first, we show our work about the van der Waals/Casimir-Polder interactions between two atoms in an out-of-equilibrium condition due to their uniformly accelerated motion. We study the system of two uniformly accelerated atoms in vacuum space, when they are in their ground-state and when they are in a correlated state (one excited and one ground-state atom). We analyze this system both with an heuristic semiclassical model and with a more rigorous method, based on a separation of radiation reaction and vacuum fluctuations contributions, th…