Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Physical Sciences and Mathematics

PDF

Dartmouth Scholarship

2006

Gravitation

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Exact Casimir Interaction Between Eccentric Cylinders, D. A. R. Dalvit, F. C. Lombardo, F. D. Mazzitelli, R. Onofrio Aug 2006

Exact Casimir Interaction Between Eccentric Cylinders, D. A. R. Dalvit, F. C. Lombardo, F. D. Mazzitelli, R. Onofrio

Dartmouth Scholarship

The Casimir force is the ultimate background in ongoing searches for extragravitational forces in the micrometer range. Eccentric cylinders offer favorable experimental conditions for such measurements as spurious gravitational and electrostatic effects can be minimized. Here we report on the evaluation of the exact Casimir interaction between perfectly conducting eccentric cylinders using a mode summation technique, and study different limiting cases of relevance for Casimir force measurements, with potential implications for the understanding of mechanical properties of nanotubes.


Sudden Gravitational Transition, Robert R. Caldwell, William Komp, Leonard Parker, Daniel A. T. Vanzella Jan 2006

Sudden Gravitational Transition, Robert R. Caldwell, William Komp, Leonard Parker, Daniel A. T. Vanzella

Dartmouth Scholarship

We investigate the properties of a cosmological scenario which undergoes a gravitational phase transition at late times. In this scenario, the Universe evolves according to general relativity in the standard, hot big bang picture until a redshift z≲1. Nonperturbative phenomena associated with a minimally-coupled scalar field catalyzes a transition, whereby an order parameter consisting of curvature quantities such as R2, RabRab, RabcdRabcd acquires a constant expectation value. The ensuing cosmic acceleration appears driven by a dark-energy component with an equation-of-state w<−1. We evaluate the constraints from type 1a supernovae, the cosmic microwave background, and other cosmological observations. We find that a range of models making a sharp transition to cosmic acceleration are consistent with observations.