学术报告（9月5日下午16：00-17:00）

主持人：董建文教授

欢迎广大师生前来参与！

摘要：To obtain more capabilities, devices are becoming smaller and smaller. Because nanostructures are extremely sensitive to undesirable forces, managing force represents the biggest challenge in nanoscale mechanics. Quantum thermal fluctuation induced electromagnetic fields result in attractive forces between closely spaced electrically neutral surfaces, called Casimir force. The lateral component of Casimir interactions has been predicted to provide frictional forces between two non-contact surfaces.  

For two surfaces of the same material, Casimir force is intrinsically always monotonically attractive, which results in disaster of unavoidable adhesion and friction in micro-/nano- machines. In my talk, I will focus on my recent theoretical and experimental demonstration of repulsive Casimir force so that the components in nanomachines can remain noncontact. 

The existence of quantum friction is still under debate. However, all theoretical studies so far are extremely difficult to verify in experiment. At the end, I will theoretically propose a model system for observing this quantum phenomenon.

报告人简介：

Rongkuo Zhao is a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Xiang Zhang in Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center and Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his current position, he was a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Research Fellow in John Pendry’s group in Department of Physics at Imperial College London in the UK. He completed his BS degree in Applied Physics in 2007 at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. He received his Ph.D. degree in Optics from Beijing Normal University in 2011, co-supervised by Dahe Liu in China and Costas Soukoulis at Iowa State University. His research interests are in quantum and thermal fluctuation-induced electromagnetic interactions including van der Waals and Casimir forces, noncontact quantum friction, and radiative heat transfer, and also in understanding the interaction of light with artificial nanostructures such as metamaterials, plasmonics, and photonic crystals.