14/07/2025
Gravity is the sea we swim in, big ideas being turned over and found wanting….
What is gravity? More importantly how do we experience it?
Hard to describe easier to experience, an integrated structure glides through gravity and is supported by it….
Physicists have taken a major step in controlling one of the universe’s most elusive forces.
By reversing a quantum force, they figured out how to turn repulsion into attraction — opening the door to levitation.
Arizona State University’s Frank Wilczek, along with Qing-Dong Jiang of Stockholm University, has shown for the first time that the Casimir force can be reversed, made repulsive, and even fine-tuned using special materials and magnetic fields.
The Casimir force is a a quantum phenomenon typically known for pulling metal plates together in a vacuum.
This breakthrough opens new doors in nanotechnology and quantum materials, particularly in fields where minimizing contact or friction at the nanoscale is critical.
The researchers introduced a “chiral” material between the plates — one that differentiates between left- and right-circularly polarized photons, similar to how human hands are mirror images.
This setup allowed them to not only flip the Casimir force from attractive to repulsive but also amplify it to more than three times the usual strength under certain conditions.
Their work reveals that by adjusting plate distance and magnetic fields, the force can oscillate, shift direction, and be precisely controlled—potentially revolutionizing the design of microchips and nano-devices where stiction (surface sticking) is a major engineering hurdle.
learn more https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.99.125403
