Related papers: Critical Casimir forces and colloidal aggregation:…
We investigate the effect of polydispersity on fluctuation-induced interactions between colloids trapped at a fluid interface. Using the scattering-matrix formalism, we calculate the interaction energy in two- and three-body systems under…
The statistical mechanical approach to Casimir problems for dielectrics separated by a vacuum gap turns out to be compact and effective. A central ingredient of this method is the effect of interacting fluctuating dipole moments of the…
We study colloidal particles with chemically inhomogeneous surfaces suspended in a critical binary liquid mixture. The inhomogeneous particle surface is composed of patches with alternating adsorption preferences for the two components of…
A general class of nonadditive sticky-hard-sphere binary mixtures, where small and large spheres represent the solvent and the solute, respectively, is introduced. The solute-solute and solvent-solvent interactions are of hard-sphere type,…
Entropic forces in colloidal suspensions and in polymer-colloid systems are of long-standing and continuing interest. Experiments show how entropic forces can be used to control the self-assembly of colloidal particles. Significant advances…
Using the quasi-exact density-matrix renormalization-group method we calculate the solvation forces in two-dimensional Ising films of thickness L subject to identical algebraically decaying boundary fields with various decay exponents p. At…
We study the spatial fluctuations of the Casimir-Polder force experienced by an atom or a small sphere moved above a metallic plate at fixed separation distance. We demonstrate that unlike the mean force, the magnitude of these fluctuations…
A novel approach for calculating Casimir forces between periodically deformed objects is developed. This approach allows, for the first time, a rigorous non-perturbative treatment of the Casimir effect for disconnected objects beyond…
We present both analytical and numerical results for the behaviour of the Casimir force in a Ginzburg-Landau type model of a film of a simple fluid or binary liquid mixture in which the confining surfaces are strongly adsorbing but…
Quantum fluctuations give rise to van der Waals and Casimir forces that dominate the interaction between electrically neutral objects at sub-micron separations. Under the trend of miniaturization, such quantum electrodynamical effects are…
We report a numerical study of equilibrium phase-diagrams and interfacial properties of bulk and confined colloid-polymer mixtures using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. Colloidal particles are treated as hard spheres, while the…
We study the Casimir effect in the vicinity of a quantum critical point. As a prototypical system we analyze the $d$-dimensional imperfect (mean-field) Bose gas enclosed in a slab of extension $L^{d-1}\times D$ and subject to periodic…
Limited-valency colloidal particles can self-assemble into polymeric structures analogous to molecules. While their structural equilibrium properties have attracted wide attention, insight into their dynamics has proven challenging. Here,…
Casimir-type forces, such as those between two neutral conducting plates, or between a sphere, atom or molecule and a plate have been widely studied and are becoming of increasing significance, for example, in nanotechnology. A key…
The solvation force of a simple fluid confined between identical planar walls is studied in two model systems with short ranged fluid-fluid interactions and long ranged wall-fluid potentials decaying as $-Az^{-p}, z\to \infty$, for various…
The concept of fluctuation-induced effective interactions is extended to systems driven out of equilibrium. We compute the forces experienced by macroscopic objects immersed in a soft material driven by external shaking sources. We show…
Thermal fluctuations of a critical system induce long-ranged Casimir forces between objects that couple to the underlying field. For two dimensional (2D) conformal field theories (CFT) we derive an exact result for the Casimir interaction…
The presence of finite energy in quantum vacuum has profound implications to physics at the microscopic and macroscopic levels. One of the direct consequences of vacuum energy is the Casimir Force, which is a force of attraction experienced…
We investigate bridging and aggregation of two colloidal particles in a near-critical binary mixture when the fluid far from the particles is outside the coexistence (CX) curve and is rich in the component disfavored by the colloid…
An exact statistical mechanical derivation is given of the critical Casimir interactions between two defects in a planar lattice-gas Ising model. Each defect is a group of nearest-neighbor spins with modified coupling constants. Such a…