Repulsive to Attractive Fluctuation-Induced Forces in Disordered Landau-Ginzburg Model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disorder influences fluctuation-induced forces in a disordered Landau-Ginzburg model, revealing that the force's nature can switch from repulsive to attractive depending on disorder strength.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of fluctuation-induced forces in a disordered Landau-Ginzburg model using the distributional zeta-function method, highlighting the disorder's impact on force sign.

Findings

Force sign depends non-trivially on disorder strength

Long-range fluctuations emerge at specific disorder levels

Disorder can induce a transition from repulsive to attractive forces

Abstract

Critical fluctuations of some order parameter describing a fluid generates long-range forces between boundaries. Here, we discuss fluctuation-induced forces associated to a disordered Landau-Ginzburg model defined in a $d$-dimensional slab geometry $\mathbb R^{d-1}\times[0,L]$. In the model the strength of the disordered field is defined by a non-thermal control parameter. We study a nearly critical scenario, using the distributional zeta-function method, where the quenched free energy is written as a series of the moments of the partition function. In the Gaussian approximation, we show that, for each moment of the partition function, and for some specific strength of the disorder, the non-thermal fluctuations, associated to an order parameter-like quantity, becomes long-ranged. We demonstrate that the sign of the fluctuation induced force between boundaries, depend in a non-trivial way on the strength of the aforementioned non-thermal control parameter.