In one minute

In an invited paper, Fabrizio Pinto traces the history of computing interatomic and Casimir forces, from early theory and experiment to realistic micro- and nanodevices. He singles out time-modulating the Casimir force: changing its magnitude and sign is a key principle for building thermodynamic nano-engines. The other lever is geometry, after the discovery that standard numerical electromagnetism can compute Casimir forces in arbitrary shapes. He shows that plain finite differencing recovers the Lifshitz results for parallel slabs, then explores other geometries, membranes deformed by Casimir forces and anisotropic materials. The field will feed breakthrough industrial products and next-generation experiments.

Finite difference computation of Casimir forces