Andrea Gambassi

Direct measurement of critical Casimir forces.

When fluctuating fields are confined between two surfaces, long-range forces arise. A famous example is the quantum-electrodynamical Casimir force that results from zero-point vacuum fluctuations confined between two conducting metal plates. A thermodynamic analogue is the critical Casimir force: it acts between surfaces immersed in a binary liquid mixture close to its critical point and arises from the confinement of concentration fluctuations within the thin film of fluid separating the surfaces. So far, all experimental evidence for the existence of this effect has been indirect. Here we report the direct measurement of critical Casimir force between a single colloidal sphere and a flat silica surface immersed in a mixture of water and 2,6-lutidine near its critical point. We use total internal reflection microscopy to determine in situ the forces between the sphere and the surface, with femtonewton resolution. Depending on whether the adsorption preferences of the sphere and the surface for water and 2,6-lutidine are identical or opposite, we measure attractive and repulsive forces, respectively, that agree quantitatively with theoretical predictions and exhibit exquisite dependence on the temperature of the system. We expect that these features of critical Casimir forces may result in novel uses of colloids as model systems.

Critical Casimir effect in classical binary liquid mixtures

If a fluctuating medium is confined, the ensuing perturbation of its fluctuation spectrum generates Casimir-like effective forces acting on its confining surfaces. Near a continuous phase transition of such a medium the corresponding order parameter fluctuations occur on all length scales and therefore close to the critical point this effect acquires a universal character, i.e., to a large extent it is independent of the microscopic details of the actual system. Accordingly it can be calculated theoretically by studying suitable representative model systems. We report on the direct measurement of critical Casimir forces by total internal reflection microscopy with femtonewton resolution. The corresponding potentials are determined for individual colloidal particles floating above a substrate under the action of the critical thermal noise in the solvent medium, constituted by a binary liquid mixture of water and 2,6-lutidine near its lower consolute point. Depending on the relative adsorption preferences of the colloid and substrate surfaces with respect to the two components of the binary liquid mixture, we observe that, upon approaching the critical point of the solvent, attractive or repulsive forces emerge and supersede those prevailing away from it. Based on the knowledge of the critical Casimir forces acting in film geometries within the Ising universality class and with equal or opposing boundary conditions, we provide the corresponding theoretical predictions for the sphere-planar wall geometry of the experiment. The experimental data for the effective potential can be interpreted consistently in terms of these predictions and a remarkable quantitative agreement is observed.

Ageing properties of critical systems

In the past few years, systems with slow dynamics have attracted considerable theoretical and experimental interest. Ageing phenomena are observed during this everlasting non-equilibrium evolution. A simple instance of such a behaviour is provided by the dynamics that takes place when a system is quenched from its high-temperature phase to the critical point. The aim of this review is to summarize the various numerical and analytical results that have been recently obtained for this case. Particular emphasis is put on the field-theoretical methods that can be used to provide analytical predictions for the relevant dynamical quantities. Fluctuation–dissipation relations are discussed and in particular the concept of fluctuation–dissipation ratio (FDR) is reviewed, emphasizing its connection with the definition of a possible effective temperature. The renormalization-group approach to critical dynamics is summarized and the scaling forms of the time-dependent non-equilibrium correlation and response functions of a generic observable are discussed. From them, the universality of the associated FDR follows as an amplitude ratio. It is then possible to provide predictions for ageing quantities in a variety of different models. In particular, the results for models A, B and C dynamics of the O(N) Ginzburg–Landau Hamiltonian, and model A dynamics of the weakly dilute Ising magnet and of the 3 theory are reviewed and compared with the available numerical results and exact solutions. The effect of a planar surface on the ageing behaviour of model A dynamics is also addressed within the mean-field approximation.

Monte Carlo simulation results for critical Casimir forces

The confinement of critical fluctuations in soft media induces critical Casimir forces acting on the confining surfaces. The temperature and geometry dependences of such forces are characterized by universal scaling functions. A novel approach is presented to determine them for films via Monte Carlo simulations of lattice models. The method is based on an integration scheme of free energy differences. Our results for the Ising and the XY universality class agree well with corresponding experimental results for wetting layers of classical binary liquid mixtures and of 4He, respectively.

The Casimir effect: From quantum to critical fluctuations

The Casimir effect in quantum electrodynamics (QED) is perhaps the best-known example of fluctuation-induced long-ranged force acting on objects (conducting plates) immersed in a fluctuating medium (quantum electromagnetic field in vacuum). A similar effect emerges in statistical physics, where the force acting, e.g., on colloidal particles immersed in a binary liquid mixture is affected by the classical thermal fluctuations occurring in the surrounding medium. The resulting Casimir-like force acquires universal features upon approaching a critical point of the medium and becomes long-ranged at criticality. In turn, this universality allows one to investigate theoretically the temperature dependence of the force via representative models and to stringently test the corresponding predictions in experiments. In contrast to QED, the Casimir force resulting from critical fluctuations can be easily tuned with respect to strength and sign by surface treatments and temperature control. We present some recent advances in the theoretical study of the universal properties of the critical Casimir force arising in thin films. The corresponding predictions compare very well with the experimental results obtained for wetting layers of various fluids. We discuss how the Casimir force between a colloidal particle and a planar wall immersed in a binary liquid mixture has been measured with femto-Newton accuracy, comparing these experimental results with the corresponding theoretical predictions.

Universal scaling functions of critical Casimir forces obtained by Monte Carlo simulations

Effective Casimir forces induced by thermal fluctuations in the vicinity of bulk critical points are studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations in three-dimensional systems for film geometries and within the experimentally relevant Ising and XY universality classes. Several surface universality classes of the confining surfaces are considered, some of which are relevant for recent experiments. An approach introduced previously [O. Vasilyev, EPL 80, 60009 (2007)], based inter alia on an integration scheme of free-energy differences, is utilized to compute the universal scaling functions of the critical Casimir forces in the critical range of temperatures above and below the bulk critical temperature. The resulting predictions are compared with corresponding experimental data for wetting films of fluids and with available theoretical results.

Prethermalization in a nonintegrable quantum spin chain after a quench.

We study the dynamics of a quantum Ising chain after the sudden introduction of a nonintegrable long-range interaction. Via an exact mapping onto a fully connected lattice of hard-core bosons, we show that a prethermal state emerges and we investigate its features by focusing on a class of physically relevant observables. In order to gain insight into the eventual thermalization, we outline a diagrammatic approach which complements the study of the previous quasistationary state and provides the basis for a self-consistent solution of the kinetic equation. This analysis suggests that both the temporal decay towards the prethermal state and the crossover to the eventual thermal one may occur algebraically.

Large deviations and universality in quantum quenches.

We study the large deviation statistics of the intensive work done by globally changing a control parameter in a thermally isolated quantum many-body system. We show that, upon approaching a critical point, large deviations well below the mean work display universal features related to the critical Casimir effect in the corresponding classical system. Large deviations well above the mean are, instead, of quantum nature and not captured by the quantum-to-classical correspondence. For a bosonic system we show that in this latter regime a transition from exponential to power-law statistics, analogous to the equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation, may occur depending on the parameters of the quench and on the spatial dimensionality.

Normal and lateral critical Casimir forces between colloids and patterned substrates

We study the normal and lateral effective critical Casimir forces acting on a spherical colloid immersed in a critical binary solvent and close to a chemically structured substrate with alternating adsorption preference. We calculate the universal scaling function for the corresponding potential and compare our results with recent experimental data (Soyka F., Zvyagolskaya O., Hertlein C., Helden L. and Bechinger C., Phys. Rev. Lett., 101 (2008) 208301). The experimental potentials are properly captured by our predictions only by accounting for geometrical details of the substrate pattern for which, according to our theory, critical Casimir forces turn out to be a sensitive probe.

Two-loop critical fluctuation-dissipation ratio for the relaxational dynamics of the O(N) Landau-Ginzburg Hamiltonian.

The off-equilibrium purely dissipative dynamics (model A) of the O(N) vector model is considered at criticality in an epsilon=4-d>0 expansion up to O(epsilon(2)). The scaling behavior of two-time response and correlation functions at zero momentum, the associated universal scaling functions and the nontrivial limit of the fluctuation-dissipation ratio are determined in the aging regime.