Isotope effect on the Casimir force
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
2022-09-07 v1 Materials Science
Other Condensed Matter
Atomic Physics
Quantum Physics
Abstract
Isotopic dependence of the Casimir force is key to probing new physics and pushing novel technologies at the micro and nanoscale, but is largely unexplored. In 2002, an isotope effect of 10^(-4) was estimated for metals -- orders of magnitude beyond the experimental resolution. Here, by employing the Lifshitz theory, we reveal a significant isotope effect of over 10^(-1) for polar dielectrics. This effect arises from the isotope-mass-induced line shift of the zone-center optical phonons and is insensitive to the linewidth. We perform numerical analyses on both the imaginary and real-frequency axes, and derive analytical formulas for predicting the isotope effect.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2209.01931,
title = {Isotope effect on the Casimir force},
author = {Lanyi Xie and Fuwei Yang and Bai Song},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.01931},
year = {2022}
}