Proposal for measurement of repulsive Casimir forces using silicon membranes

We present a procedure to measure the Casimir forces, a direct manifestation of boundary dependence of quantum vacuum due to the alteration by the boundaries of the zero-point electromagnetic energy, using MEMS. Our approach is based on the measurement of the frequency shift of a silicon membrane caused by Casimir forces. We present theoretically computations of that frequency shift using the Anharmonic Casmir Oscillator model for different experimental configurations. Our main aim is to measure the repulsive Casimir forces using geometric approach and use these repulsive forces to minimize the sticktion of MEMS. © 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.