Casimir-Polder force for a polarizable molecule near a dielectric substrate out of thermal equilibrium

Abstract

We demonstrate that the Casimir-Polder force for a molecule near the surface of a real dielectric substrate out of thermal equilibrium displays distinctive behaviors as compared to that at thermal equilibrium. In particular, when the molecule-substrate separation is much less than the molecular transition wave-length, the CP force in the high temperature limit can be dramatically manipulated by varying the relative magnitude of the temperatures of the substrate and the environment so that the attractive-to-repulsive transition can occur beyond certain a threshold temperature of either the substrate or the environment depending on which one is higher for molecules both in the ground and excited states. More remarkably, when the separation is comparable to the wave-length, such transitions which are impossible at thermal equilibrium may happen for longitudinally polarizable molecules with a small permittivity, while for isotropically polarizable ones the transitions can even occur at room temperature for some dielectric substrates such as sapphire and graphite which is much lower than the temperature for the transition to take place in the thermal equilibrium case, thus making the experimental demonstration of such force transitions easier.