Graphene may help to solve the Casimir conundrum in indium tin oxide systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes adding a graphene sheet to an ITO film to clarify the cause of the Casimir force reduction, distinguishing between phase transition effects and surface modifications, and provides a theoretical framework for precise force calculations.

Contribution

The study introduces a new experimental scheme with graphene to differentiate the causes of Casimir force changes in ITO systems and develops a formalism for accurate force computation involving graphene and ITO.

Findings

Graphene addition causes only minor Casimir force decrease.

The observed force drop is unlikely due to UV-induced surface modification.

The proposed method can help resolve Lifshitz theory application issues.

Abstract

We reconsider the long-explored problem that the magnitude of the measured Casimir force between an Au sphere and an indium tin oxide (ITO) film decreases significantly with no respective changes in the ITO dielectric permittivity required by the Lifshitz theory. Two plausible resolutions of this conundrum are discussed: the phase transition of an ITO film from metallic to dielectric state and the modification of a film surface under the action of UV light. To exclude the latter option, we propose an improvement in the experimental scheme by adding a graphene sheet on top of an ITO film. The formalism is developed allowing precise calculation of the Casimir force between an Au sphere and a graphene sheet on top of ITO film deposited on a quartz substrate. In doing so Au, ITO, and quartz are described by the frequency-dependent dielectric permittivities and real graphene sheet with nonzero mass-gap parameter and chemical potential by the polarization tensor at nonzero temperature. Numerical computations performed both before and after the phase transition resulting from the UV treatment show that the presence of graphene leads to only a minor decrease in the drop of the Casimir force which remains quite measurable. At the same time, in the presence of graphene the guess that an observed drop originates from the modification of an ITO surface by the UV light breaks down. Similar results are obtained for the configuration of two parallel plates consisting of a graphene sheet, an ITO film and a quartz substrate. The proposed experiments involving additional graphene sheets may help in resolution of the problems arising in application of the Lifshitz theory to real materials.