Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Measurement of the temperature dependence of the Casimir-Polder force through collective excitations of a Bose-Einstein condensate
John Obrecht, Robert J. Wild, David M. Harber, C. A. Gillespie, Eric Cornell
Abstract
. In particular, when the tem-perature of the surface is different from the temperature of free space, the forceis predicted to decay more slowly at large distances and to exhibit a strongerdependence on the temperature. By positioning a Rb-87 Bose-Einstein con-densate a few microns from a dielectric surface and resonantly exciting it intoa mechanical dipole oscillation, the JILA team has recently observed changesin the collective oscillation frequency that result from the spatial variations inthe force