题目：Casimir forces in micromechanical systems

时间：2012年12月21日，星期五   上午 10:00

地点：三楼会议室

报告人：陈浩斌（Chan, Ho Bun）副教授

香港科技大学物理系

Abstract

The miniaturization of mechanical devices opens new opportunities for investigating and exploiting novel phenomena that occur for components in close proximity. The Casimir force, for example, is the attraction between neutral conductors that originates from the zero-point quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic fields. I will describe experiments that demonstrated the Casimir effect in micromechanical devices. In one experiment, we measured the Casimir force on a silicon surface with strong deformations at the nanoscale. The measured force is found to be 20% larger than the pairwise addition of van der Waals force, demonstrating the non-trivial dependence of the Casimir force on the shape of the interacting objects. Recently, we showed that the Casimir force can become the dominant interaction between micromechanical components within a single silicon chip. This result represents the first step towards on-chip exploitation of the Casimir force.