Casimir forces between cylinders at different temperatures

We study Casimir interactions between cylinders in thermal nonequilibrium, where the objects as well as the environment are held at different temperatures. We provide the general formula for the force, in a one reflection approximation, for cylinders of arbitrary radii and optical properties. As is...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Golyk, Vladyslav A., Kardar, Mehran, Reid, M. T. Homer, Krueger, Matthias Helmut Guenter
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72086
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1112-5912
Description
Summary:We study Casimir interactions between cylinders in thermal nonequilibrium, where the objects as well as the environment are held at different temperatures. We provide the general formula for the force, in a one reflection approximation, for cylinders of arbitrary radii and optical properties. As is the case for equilibrium, we find that the force for optically diluted cylinders can be obtained by appropriate summation of the corresponding result for spheres. We find that the nonequilibrium forces are generally larger than their equilibrium counterpart at separations greater than the thermal wavelength. They may also exhibit oscillations as function of separation, leading to stable points of zero net force. These effects are particularly pronounced for thin conducting cylinders (e.g. 40 nm diameter nanowires of tungsten) due to their large emissivity.