IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v386y2007i1p31-35.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Repulsive and attractive critical Casimir forces

Author

Listed:
  • Rafaï, Salima
  • Bonn, Daniel
  • Meunier, Jacques

Abstract

When confining vacuum fluctuations between two identical walls, the Casimir force manifests itself as a mutual attraction of the walls. When confining concentration fluctuations of a binary liquid mixture, an analogous force should exist near the critical temperature TC; it is called the critical Casimir force. Here we show experimentally that this purely entropic force can be either attractive or repulsive, depending on the boundary conditions for the fluctuations. For symmetrical boundary conditions an attractive force is found while asymmetrical ones lead to a repulsive force. This is observed directly by confining the fluctuations in a thin (≈100A˚) wetting film. Depending on the boundary conditions either a thinning or a thickening of the film is observed when T→TC.

Suggested Citation

  • Rafaï, Salima & Bonn, Daniel & Meunier, Jacques, 2007. "Repulsive and attractive critical Casimir forces," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 386(1), pages 31-35.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:386:y:2007:i:1:p:31-35
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2007.07.072
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437107008175
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2007.07.072?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dantchev, Daniel & Vassilev, Vassil M. & Djondjorov, Peter A., 2018. "Analytical results for the Casimir force in a Ginzburg–Landau type model of a film with strongly adsorbing competing walls," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 510(C), pages 302-315.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:386:y:2007:i:1:p:31-35. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.