First Casimir Force Chip

As the experiments of recent years have proved, in a physical vacuum, energy vibrations constantly occur due to the birth and annihilation of particles. Many unusual physical phenomena that seem to contradict the law of conservation of energy are proof of this continuous energy drilling on a Planck scale. For example, vacuum polarization , Casimir effect or Hawking radiation .

For many years, scientists could not reliably measure the Casimir effect predicted by the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir in 1946. The effect of attraction of uncharged bodies to each other under the influence of vacuum energy appears at a distance of several microns.

Casimir Force (F _c) for two parallel plates of area A inversely proportional to the 4th power of the distance between them, so it is rather difficult to measure.



The experiments of the 1990-2000s made it possible to measure the strength of Casimir with an accuracy of more than 99%. A team of researchers from the University of Florida has taken another step in this direction. They constructed the first chip to measure the Casimir force between the electrode and a silicon wafer 1.42 nm thick at room temperature. The device operates in automatic mode and is equipped with an actuator that adjusts the distance between the plates from 1.92 nm to 260 nm, observing parallelism. The measurement results quite accurately coincide with the theoretically calculated values.



This experiment proves that at small distances the Casimir force can be the main force of interaction between objects. It is possible that it can be used for practical purposes, when creating MEMS-designs. For example, using lithography, you can print blanks that, under the influence of the Casimir force, can independently be folded into a complex geometric shape, previously calculated on a computer.

via Technology Review