Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 398
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-40748-0

Regular Article

Stable multilayer structure based on restoring Casimir forces

¹ School of Telecommunication, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, P.R. China
² Beijing Computational Science Research Center, Beijing 100084, P.R. China
³ School of physics and information technology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’ an 710061, P.R. China
⁴ Department of Physics, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, P.R. China

^a e-mail: rz1008@gmail.com
^b e-mail: yangyaping@hotmail.com

Received: 15 May 2013
Received in final form: 8 August 2013
Published online: 25 September 2013

Abstract

The stability of the mesoscopic multilayer structure resulting from the Casimir effect is investigated. For the multilayer structure composed of periodic metal and metamaterial layers, we focus on the formation of the restoring Casimir forces that simultaneously stably equilibrate each layer of the structure with the suitably chosen frequency-dependent electromagnetic properties of the materials. The stable equilibrium distances for the layers are discussed, and the influences of the metamaterial characteristic frequencies and of the layer thickness are shown. Since the system stability is induced only by the Casimir forces, this mesoscopic multilayer can be considered as a stable non-touching “Casimir solid”.