Credit: Image courtesy of Alan Stonebraker, American Physical Society.

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

In a series of articles, we have addressed the measurable macroscopic effect coming from the microscopic vacuum fluctuations. The Casimir effect has proven to not only attract fixed or moving plates of the same material located micrometers apart, but it also has a measurable impact in nanoparticles.

In former works, the Casimir effect had been held responsible for the forces and torsional effects measured. This time it surprises us with a measured  and theoretically explained repulsive force.

Only attractive interactions had been measured so far, but according to theoretical predictions, the sign and hence direction of the force could change from attractive to repulsive depending on the material and configuration of the setup. This had been achieved experimentally in 2009 by Capasso et al., from Harvard University, by choosing a...