Physicists tweak quantum force, reducing barrier to ti... (ve important as the separations between ...)

Physicists tweak quantum force, reducing barrier to tiny devices

Date:7/14/2008

ve important as the separations between components in tiny machinery shrink from micrometer, or millionths of a meter, toward nanometer size, Chan said.

"A lot of people are thinking of ways to reduce stiction, and this research opens up one possibility," he said.

Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir first predicted that two closely spaced metal plates would be mutually attracted in 1948. It took several decades, but in 1996, physicist Steve Lamoreaux, then at the University of Washington, performed the first accurate measurement of the Casimir force using a torsional pendulum, an instrument for measuring very weak forces.

Subsequently, in a paper published in Science in 2001, Chan and other members of a Bell Labs team reported tapping the Casimir force to move a tiny metal see-saw. The researchers suspended a metal sphere an extremely tiny but well-controlled distance above the see-saw to "push" it up and down. It was the first demonstration of the Casimir force affecting a micromechanical device.

In the latest research, the physicists radically altered the shape of the metal plates, corrugating them into evenly spaced trenches so that they resembled a kind of three-dimensional comb. They then compared the Casimir forces generated by these corrugated objects with those generated by standard plates, all also against a metal sphere.

The result? "The force is smaller for the corrugated object but not as small as we anticipated," Chan said, adding that if corrugating the metal reduced its total area by half, the Casimir force was reduced by only 30 to 40 percent.

Chan said the experiment shows that it is not possible to simply add the force on the constituent solid parts of the plate in this case, the tines to arrive at the total force. Rather, he said, "the force actually depends on the geometry of the object."

"Until now, no significant or nontrivial corrections to the Casimir force due to boundary conditio
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Contact: Ho Bun Chan
hochan@phys.ufl.edu
352-392-6691
University of Florida
Source:Eurekalert

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Physicists tweak quantum force, reducing barrier to ti...(ve important as the separations between ...)