Casimir Force in a Model with Strongly Adsorbing Competing Walls: Analytical Results

Abstract

We present both analytical and numerical results for the behaviour of the Casimir force in a Ginzburg-Landau type model of a film of a simple fluid or binary liquid mixture in which the confining surfaces are strongly adsorbing but preferring different phases of the simple fluid, or different components of the mixture. Under such boundary conditions an interface is formed between the competing phases inside the system which are forced to coexist. We investigate the force as a function of the temperature and in the presence of an external ordering field and determine the (temperature-field) relief map of the force. We prove the existence of a single global maximum of the force and find its position and value. We find the asymptotic behavior of the force when any of the scaling fields becomes large while the other one is negligible. Contrary to the case of symmetric boundary conditions we find, as expected, that the finite system does not possess a phase transition of its own for any finite values of the scaling variables corresponding to the temperature and the ordering field. We perform the study near the bulk critical temperature of the corresponding bulk system and find a perfect agreement with the finite-size scaling theory.