Surface-atom force out of thermal equilibrium and its effect on cold atoms

Mauro Antezza

Mauro Antezza

Thermal effects of the surface-atom interaction : theory and recent experimental results with ultra-cold gases

Mauro Antezza

Mauro Antezza

The surface–atom Casimir–Polder–Lifshitz force out of thermal equilibrium is investigated in the framework of macroscopic electrodynamics. Particular attention is devoted to its large distance limit that shows a new, stronger behaviour with respect to the equilibrium case. The frequency shift produced by the surface–atom force on the centre-of-mass oscillations of a harmonically trapped Bose–Einstein condensate and on the Bloch oscillations of an ultra-cold fermionic gas in an optical lattice are discussed for configurations out of thermal equilibrium.

Daniel. SahaguÌn SaÌnchez

Ahmad Firdaus Khaidir, S. N. Sabki, Mohamad Nazri Abdul Halif

Cold atoms can be trapped and guided using nanofabricated wires on microengineered surfaces, achieving the scales required by quantum information proposals on the consequences of Casimir-Polder (CP) force to its stability and lifetime. The atoms are found to be less attractive to the thin films compared to dielectric half plate, where the attractive potential drops even further when the thickness of the surface is lower than both thermal wavelength and the spacing length. Amiably, for the spherical surface, the CP potential decays even further as radial thickness decreases. We approximate the CP potential using the analytical expression obtained from the pairwise summation (PWS) calculated by taking a sum of single atom with the jumbled atoms inside the surface, treating them as two-bodies system as a whole. The means of PWS are to calculate the possibilities of geometrical effect: planar and curved surface on the CP potential.