Eur. Phys. J. B (2018) 91: 71
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2018-80724-6

Regular Article

Dependence of chaotic actuation dynamics of Casimir oscillators on optical properties and electrostatic effects

¹ Department of Physics, Alzahra University, Tehran 1993891167, Iran
² Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 4, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands
³ Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 9, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands

^a e-mail: g.palasantzas@rug.nl

Received: 25 December 2017
Received in final form: 2 February 2018
Published online: 30 April 2018

Abstract

With Casimir and electrostatic forces playing a crucial role for the performance and stability of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), the presence of chaotic behavior, which is often unavoidable, leads to device malfunction due to stiction. Therefore, we investigate here how the optical properties of different materials influence the chaotic behavior of electrostatic torsional MEMS due to changes in magnitude of the Casimir forces and torques. We consider the materials Au, which is a good conductor, AIST, which is a phase change material being close to metal in the crystalline state, and finally doped SiC as a very poor conductor. For the conservative systems, there is no chaotic behavior and the analysis of phase portraits and bifurcation diagrams reveal the strong sensitivity of stable actuation dynamics on the material optical properties, while applied electrostatic potentials lead faster to instability and stiction for higher conductivity materials. For the driven systems, the Melnikov method is used to study the chaotic behavior. The results from this method are supported by the study of the contours of the transient time to stiction in the phase plane, which reveal a substantially increased chaotic behavior for higher conductivity materials, associated with stronger Casimir torques and applied electrostatic potentials.