English

Phonon Casimir effect in polyatomic systems

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2021-06-02 v2 Other Condensed Matter

Abstract

The phonon Casimir effect describes the phonon-mediated interaction between defects in condensed-matter systems. Using the path-integral formalism, we derive a general method for calculating the Helmholtz free energy due to vibrational modes in systems of arbitrary dimensionality and composition. Our results make it possible to extract the defect interaction energy at any temperature for various defect configurations. We demonstrate our approach in action by performing numerical calculations for mono- and diatomic chains, as well as a diatomic molecule, at zero and finite temperatures and validate our results using exact diagonalization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.11082,
  title  = {Phonon Casimir effect in polyatomic systems},
  author = {Gideon Lee and Aleksandr Rodin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.11082},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

12 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T21:06:54.139Z