SIUC Physics Seminar
School of Physics and Applied Physics, Southern Illinois University--Carbondale
2024 December 6 Friday 4:00 PM:
Physics Seminar in Neckers 440
Title: The Vacuum Pulls, Pushes, and Twists: Quantum Vacuum Forces and Torques
Speaker: Kimball A. Milton
Affiliation: The University of Oklahoma
Abstract:
For nearly 50 years, it has been appreciated that when two bodies move parallel
to each other, they experience a quantum
frictional force that tends to retard the motion. (Teodorovich, 1978.) But more than a century ago, it was recognized that that a body experiences quantum friction even in vacuum! (Einstein and Hopf, 1910.) Even more remarkably, in the last decade it has been recognized that a body out of thermal equilibrium with the background blackbody radiation will experience a force and a torque, if the body is suitably asymmetric. Here we will discuss such phenomena, which are on the verge of observability, in a perturbative context, expanding in powers of
ϵ-1, where
ϵ
is the permittivity of the material making up the object.
Biography:
Kimball A. Milton is
a George Lynn Cross Research Professor Emeritus
in Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy
at the University of Oklahoma.
His research in the last two decades has concentrated on
understanding the quantum vacuum
and has dominantly guided the developments in this field.
He is well known for the authoritative biography of
Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger with Jagdish Mehra.
His textbook on Classical Electrodynamics
with Schwinger is a standard textbook on the subject.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Education
B.S. University of Washington (1967)
A.M. Harvard University (1968)
Ph.D. Harvard University (1971)
Awards & Honors
Fellow of the American Physical Society (2014)
Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics (2013 - 2014)
Foreign Member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters Academy (2011)
George Lynn Cross Research Professorship
Fellow of the Institute of Physics (2004)
Regents' Award for Superior Research & Creative Activity
Last updated on
by K V Shajesh
(kvshajesh@gmail.com).