2008/12/31 by Simen Å. Ellingsen, S. A. Ellingsen, Stefan Yoshi Buhmann +3 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.79.052903
published as Physical Review A 79 (5), 052903 (2009) · 6 pages, 3 figures, minor corrections and additions
openalex publication_date 2009/05/07 · arxiv created 2010/01/04 · arxiv updated 2010/01/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the influence of thermal Casimir-Polder forces on the near-surface trapping of cold polar molecules, with emphasis on LiH and YbF near a Au surface at room temperature. We show that even for a molecule initially prepared in its electronic and rovibrational ground state, the Casimir-Polder force oscillates with the molecule-wall separation. The nonresonant force and the evanescent part of the resonant force almost exactly cancel at high temperature which results in a saturation of the (attractive) force in this limit. This implies that the Casimir-Polder force on a fully thermalized molecule can differ dramatically from that obtained using a naive perturbative expansion of the Lifshitz formula based on the molecular ground-state polarizability. A dynamical calculation reveals how the spatial oscillations die out on a typical time scale of several seconds as thermalization of the molecule with its environment sets in.