Speaker:  Ricardo S. Decca, IUPUI

Title: Can we get something out of nothing? Searching for hypothetical forces in the Casimir regime

Abstract: In this Colloquium our measurements of forces in the Casimir regime will be presented. We loosely define this regime as when the separation between the bodies is ~200 nm. The first topics that will be discussed are how to get precise measurements, and why they are important. Our measurements are precise enough to make possible a distinction among different predictions about the thermal dependence of the Casimir interaction. These dependences arise from the use of different models for the interaction between virtual photons and real metals. I will show that our agreement with the theory is better than 0.5% (when the effect of uncertainties are taken into account in both the experiment and the theory) over a wide separation range.

The second part of the talk deals with the search for hypothetical forces at small separation between the test bodies. Since the Casimir force (of strength ~10 pN for our configuration) is too large a background, it is better to perform a completely different experiment where the effect of the Casimir interaction is minimized (which we call a “Casimir-less” experiment). I will introduce our experimental setup, that yields 6 fN/Hz 1/2 sensitivity. The current status in the search for hypothetical forces, and how much we expect to constrain parameter space with our approach will be discussed.

Work was done in collaboration with D. López, H. B. Chan, E. Fischbach, D. E. Krause, G. Klimchitskaya and V. M. Mostepanenko.

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