We examine the non-equilibrium radiative heat transfer between a plate and finite cylinders and cones, making the first accurate theoretical predictions for the total heat transfer and the spatial heat flux profile for three-dimensional compact objects including corners or tips. We find qualitatively different scaling laws for conical shapes at small separations, and in contrast to a flat/slightly-curved object, a sharp cone exhibits a local minimum in the spatially resolved heat flux directly below the tip. The method we develop, in which a scattering-theory formulation of thermal transfer is combined with a boundary-element method for computing scattering matrices, can be applied to three-dimensional objects of arbitrary shape.
We extend a previous result [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 090403 (2010)] on Casimir repulsion between a plate with a hole and a cylinder centered above it to geometries in which the central object can no longer be treated as a point dipole. We show through numerical calculations that as the distance between the plate and central object decreases, there is an intermediate regime in which the repulsive force increases dramatically. Beyond this, the force rapidly switches over to attraction as the separation decreases further to zero, in line with the proximity force approximation. We demonstrate that this effect can be understood as a competition between an increased repulsion due to a larger polarizability of the central object interacting with increased fringing fields near the edge of the plate, and attractive forces due primarily to the nonzero thickness of the plate. In comparison with our previous work, we find that using the same plate geometry but replacing the single cylinder with a ring of cylinders, or more generally an extended uniaxial conductor, the repulsive force can be enhanced by a factor of approximately 103. We conclude that this enhancement, although quite dramatic, is still too small to yield detectable repulsive Casimir forces.
We compare several methods for the efficient generation of correlated random sequences (colored noise) by filtering white noise to achieve a desired correlation spectrum. We argue that a class of IIR filter-design techniques developed in the 1970s, which obtain the global Chebyshev-optimum minimum-phase filter with a desired magnitude and arbitrary phase, are uniquely suited for this problem but have seldom been used. The short filters that result from such techniques are crucial for applications of colored noise in physical simulations involving random processes, for which many long random sequences must be generated and computational time and memory are at a premium.
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