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The ESA Programme to Develop a Casimir Force Calculation Tool
In May 2001 ESA issued an annoucment of opportunity, AO 3859, for Algorithms for Casimir Force prediction in complex and time dependant geometries. The statement of work listed the following constraints: The contractor shall perform a study summarising the current status of theoretical understanding and experimental work on vacuum fluctuations and Casimir force, using this as a basis for a modelling and simulation tool. The algorithms developed for this tool shall have the following specification: • Input to the simulation tool shall be the 3D geometry, size and possible time-dependency of the configuration for which the Casimir force is to be computed. For noise estimation, the user shall also be able to input measures such as the surface roughness, conductivity, temperature, stiffness, Young’s module and other parameters related to the configuration. • The simulation tool shall calculate the amplitude and direction of the resulting Casimir force in 3D. • The simulation tool shall provide an estimate of the noise of the system, based on the input parameters above. Error budget shall also be provided. • The simulation tool output shall be provided both in a graphical format (e.g. IDL) and in ASCII. • Analytical derivations of force geometry shall be done for a number of shapes to validate the algorithms. The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space Science and Technology Department took up the challenge. |