Temperature-dependent Casimir-Polder forces on polarizable molecules

Abstract

We demonstrate that the thermal Casimir-Polder forces on molecules near a conducting surface whose transition wavelengths are comparable to the molecule-surface separation are dependent on the ambient temperature and molecular polarization and they can even be changed from attractive to repulsive via varying the temperature across a threshold value for anisotropically polarizable molecules. Remarkably, this attractive-to-repulsive transition may be realized at room temperature. Let us note that the predicted repulsion is essentially a nonequilibrium effect since the force we calculated on a ground-state (or an excited-stated) molecule actually contains the contribution of the absorption (or emission) of thermal photons.