The reins of Casimir: Engineered nanostructures could offer way to control quantum effect

You might think that a pair of parallel plates hanging motionless in a vacuum just a fraction of a micrometer away from each other would be like strangers passing in the night—so close but destined never to meet. Thanks to quantum mechanics, you would be wrong.

Scientists working to engineer nanoscale machines know this only too well as they have to grapple with quantum forces and all the weirdness that comes with them. These quantum forces, most notably the Casimir effect, can play havoc if you need to keep closely spaced surfaces from coming together.

Controlling these effects may also be necessary for making small mechanical parts that never stick to each other, for building certain types of quantum computers, and for studying gravity at the microscale.

Now, a large collaborative research group involving scientists from a number of federal labs, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and major universities, has observed that these sticky effects can be increased or lessened by patterning one of the surfaces with nanoscale structures. The discovery, described in Nature Communications, opens a new path for tuning these effects.