Woo-Joong (Andy) Kim
Dartmouth University
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
2:00 pm in SPL 52
Exploring the thermal and dissipative effects in Casimir physics
Abstract: The Casimir force exists between two metallic parallel plates due to the consequence of pure quantum vacuum fluctuations. In reality, one must take into account for the contribution from thermal photons since it could modify the spectrum of cavity modes at room temperature. In this talk, I will report the current status of an experiment undergoing at Dartmouth College, which aims to detect the thermal correction to the Casimir force in a cylinder-plane geometry. Several usual issues of the Casimir force measurement, such as residual potential, presence of dust particles, and limited parallelism, as well as those factors affecting the measurement sensitivity like thermal drifts of resonance and the limited quality factor, will be discussed. Finally, I will describe an experimental proposal to verify the dynamical Casimir effects using superradiance of ultracold atoms. With today's growing technologies in ultracold atoms and ultra-fast oscillators from MEMS/ NEMS, the dissipative effects in quantum vacuum could be observed in the close future.