Repulsive and attractive critical Casimir forces

Salima Rafaï, Daniel Bonn and Jacques Meunier

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2007, vol. 386, issue 1, 31-35

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.

Keywords: Finite size effects; Critical Casimir effect; Wetting; Phase transitions; Critical phenomena (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:386:y:2007:i:1:p:31-35

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2007.07.072

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