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Physicists have ’solved’ mystery of levitation

Posted on August 17th, 2007 — Filed under News and Science

The University of St Andrews team has created an ‘incredible levitation effects’ by reversing the “Casimir force” which normally causes objects to stick together, so that it repels instead of attracts.

The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, but rather the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together.

Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attract.

This potentially opens the way for near-frictionless nanotechnology.

Read the full story.

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