Home page > Seminars > Previous seminars > Seminars 2011 > MSC seminar Monday June 6, 2011 at 11:30 Andrea Gambassi (SISSA, Trieste, Italy). The critical Casimir effect: thermal fluctuations in action..
Unless otherwise stated, seminars and defences take place at 11:30 in room 454A of Condorcet building.
Andrea Gambassi (SISSA, Trieste, Italy)
The critical Casimir effect: thermal fluctuations in action.
In 1948, Hendrik Casimir predicted that two uncharged conducting surfaces in vacuum attract each other due to the quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field which are spatially confined by these surfaces. The classical analogue of this effect originates from the confinement of thermal fluctuations in fluids near continuous phase transitions, such as the demixing of a mixture of two liquids or the normal-superfluid transition in 4He. Early indirect experimental evidence of the force of these fluctuations - the so-called critical Casimir force - were provided by detailed studies of complete wetting films. Thirty years after its first theoretical investigation by Michael Fisher and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes in 1978, the critical Casimir force has now been measured directly at the sub-micrometer scale by monitoring the Brownian motion of a colloidal particle close to a surface, both immersed in a near-critical liquid mixture.
I will present recent advances in the theoretical and experimental study of the universal properties of this novel fluctuation-induced force, discussing possible relevant applications for manipulating soft matter systems.
Contact : Équipe séminaires / Seminar team - Published on / Publié le 18 May 2011
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