Casimir-like forces in cooperative exclusion processes

Abstract

I show that cooperative exclusion processes with selective kinetic constraints exhibit fluctuation-induced forces that can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the density of boundary reservoirs, when their density-dependent diffusion coefficient exhibits a minimum. A mean-field analysis based on a nonlinear diffusion equation provides an estimation of the magnitude and sign of such a tunable Casimir-like force and suggests its occurrence in interacting particle systems with a diffusivity anomaly.