A scanning electron micrograph, taken with an electron
microscope, shows the comb-like structure of a metal plate at
the centre of newly published University of Florida research on
quantum physics. UF physicists found that corrugating the plate
reduced the Casimir force, a quantum force that draws together
very close objects. The discovery could prove useful as tiny 'microelectromechanical'
systems - so-called MEMS devices that are already used in a wide
array of consumer products - become so small they are affected
by quantum forces. (c) Yiliang Bao and Jie Zoue, University of
Florida
Cymbals don't clash of their own accord - in our world, anyway.
But the quantum world is bizarrely different. Two metal plates,
placed almost infinitesimally close together, spontaneously
attract each other. What seems like magic is known as the
Casimir force, and it has been well-documented in experiments.
The cause goes to the heart of quantum physics: Seemingly empty
space is not actually empty but contains virtual particles
associated with fluctuating electromagnetic fields. These
particles push the plates from both the inside and the outside.
However, only virtual particles of shorter wavelengths - in the
quantum world, particles exist simultaneously as waves - can fit
into the space between the plates, so that the outward pressure
is slightly smaller than the inward pressure. The result is the
plates are forced together.
Now, University of Florida physicists have found they can reduce
the Casimir force by altering the surface of the plates. The
discovery could prove useful as tiny 'microelectromechanical'
systems - so-called MEMS devices that are already used in a wide
array of consumer products - become so small they are affected
by quantum forces.
'We are not talking about an immediate application,' says Ho Bun
Chan, an assistant professor of physics and the first author of
a paper on the findings that appears today in the online edition
of the journal Physical Review Letters.
'We are talking about, if the devices continue to be smaller and
smaller, as the trend of miniaturisation occurs, then the
quantum effects could come into play.'
More specifically, the finding could one day help reduce what
MEMS engineers call 'stiction' - when two very small, very close
objects tend to stick together.
Although stiction has many causes - including, for example, the
presence of water molecules that tend to clump together - the
Casimir force can contribute. Such quantum effects could prove
important as the separations between components in tiny
machinery shrink from micrometre, or millionths of a metre,
toward nanometre 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 conditions have been observed
experimentally,' wrote Lamoreaux, now at Yale University, in a
commentary accompanying publication of the paper.
Source: University
of Florida