Three Body Fluctuation-Induced Interaction at Fluid Interfaces: A Strong Deviation from the Pairwise Summation

Abstract

We present a new method based on the scattering technique to investigate fluctuation-induced forces at a fluid interface. The scattering approach, well suited to the study of many body systems of arbitrary geometries, is augmented to include boundary fluctuations. Using this method, we study the deviation of the total fluctuation-induced interaction from the sum of pairwise energies for three colloidal particles. We consider both frozen and fluctuating colloids and obtain a very good agreement between analytical and numerical results. We find a marked difference in the three body fluctuation-induced free energy between the frozen and fluctuating colloids, both in sign and relative size.