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Updated: May 13, 2026

An Analog Macroscopic Technique for Studying Molecular Hydrodynamic Processes in Dense Gases and Liquids
Published on: December 4, 2017
Three-body fluctuation-induced interaction at fluid interfaces: a strong deviation from the pairwise summation
Ehsan Noruzifar1, Jef Wagner, Roya Zandi
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA.
Abstract:
We present a new method based on the scattering technique to investigate fluctuation-induced forces at a fluid interface. The scattering approach, well suited to the study of many-body systems of arbitrary geometries, is augmented to include boundary fluctuations. Using this method, we study the deviation of the total fluctuation-induced interaction from the sum of pairwise energies for three colloidal particles. We consider both frozen and fluctuating colloids and obtain a very good agreement between analytical and numerical results. We find a marked difference in the three-body fluctuation-induced free energy between the frozen and fluctuating colloids, both in sign and relative size.
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