The first chip to measure the strength of Casimir

As experiments of recent years have proved, in the physical vacuum, energy oscillations constantly occur due to the birth and annihilation of particles. Many unusual physical phenomena, which seem to contradict the law of conservation of energy, are evidence of this continuous energy turbulence on the Planck scale. For example, vacuum polarization , the 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 to each other of uncharged bodies under the influence of vacuum energy appears at a distance of several microns.

The Casimir force (F _c ) for two parallel plates of area A is inversely proportional to the 4th power of the distance between them, so it is rather difficult to measure.
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The experiments of the 1990s – 2000s made it possible to measure the Casimir force with an accuracy of more than 99%. A group of researchers from the University of Florida has taken another step in this direction. They designed the first chip to measure the Casimir force between an electrode and a silicon plate with a thickness of 1.42 nm at room temperature. The device operates in automatic mode and is equipped with an actuator, which 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-structures. For example, the method of lithography can be used to print blanks that, under the influence of Casimir’s force, can be folded independently into a complex geometric shape that was previously calculated on a computer.

via Technology Review