Observability of thermal effects in the Casimir interaction from graphene-coated substrates

Abstract

Using the recently proposed theory, we calculate thermal effect in the Casimir interaction from graphene-coated metallic and dielectric substrates. The cases when only one or both of the two parallel plates are coated with graphene are considered. It is shown that the graphene coating does not influence the Casimir interaction between metals, but produces large impact for dielectrics. This impact increases with decreasing static dielectric permittivity of the plate material. The thermal correction to the gradient of the Casimir force between an Au sphere and graphene coated fused silica plate is calculated. It is shown to be significanlty greater than the total experimental error in the recently performed experiment, which is demonstrated to be only one step away from observation of the thermal effect from a graphene-coated substrate at short separation distances. To achieve this goal, one should increase the thickness of the fused silica film from 300 nm to 2000 nm.