Casimir Force between sphere and plane
In collaboration with Michael Hartmann and Gert-Ludwig Ingold, we have published exact results for the Casimir force between spherical and planar material surfaces made of gold, for typical experimental conditions. The results suggest a new direction of investigation for solving the Casimir puzzle, thus bringing a new light on the role of Ohmic dissipation in Casimir physics. The paper was published by Physics Review Letters as an Editors’ suggestion:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.043901
See also the arxiv version
http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1705.04196
Short course on the scattering approach to the Casimir effect
Course for the ESF-Lorentz Center Casimir School/Workshop, Leiden, Netherlands, 2012: course1 and course2
Optical Tweezers
Half of the 2018 Physics Nobel prize was awarded to Arthur Ashkin for the invention of the optical tweezers. The optical tweezers lab at UFRJ develops several application in physics (Casimir force, light angular momentum) and cell biology. My former student Rafael de S. Dutra wrote an applet that calculates the optical force and trap stiffness using our theoretical model, the Mie-Debye with spherical aberration (MDSA) theory of optical tweezers. The applet is available for download here.