2012/11/16 by Zhiying Zhu, Hongwei Yu, Bin Wang
Chemistry · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Absorption (acoustics) #Atomic physics #Casimir effect #Chemical physics #Chemistry #Classical mechanics #Condensed matter physics #Excited state #Ground state #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Molecular physics #Molecule #Non-equilibrium thermodynamics #Optics #Photon #Physical chemistry #Physics #Polarizability #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum mechanics #Thermal #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #Thermal fluctuations #Thermodynamics #Wavelength #cond-mat.other #physics.atom-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.86.052508
published as Phys. Rev. A 86, 052508 (2012) · 10 pages, 2 figures
openalex publication_date 2012/11/16 · arxiv created 2012/11/19 · arxiv updated 2015/06/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We demonstrate that the thermal Casimir-Polder forces on molecules near a conducting surface whose transition wavelengths are comparable to the molecule-surface separation are dependent on the ambient temperature and molecular polarization and they can even be changed from attractive to repulsive by varying the temperature across a threshold value for anisotropically polarizable molecules. Remarkably, this attractive-to-repulsive transition may be realized at room temperature. Let us note that the predicted repulsion is essentially a nonequilibrium effect since the force we calculated on a ground-state (or an excited-stated) molecule actually contains the contribution of the absorption (or emission) of thermal photons.