REPULSIVE CASIMIR FORCES AND ALTERNATIVES TO EINSTEINIAN GRAVITY

A basic property of the Casimir force is that, in most cases, it is attractive. The quest for workable configurations which exhibit repulsionis, at the same time, important and difficult, both in the nanophysics laboratory (e.g. to avoid stickness) and at cosmological scales (to account for the accelerated expansion of our universe). We shall here report on some configurations which exhibit the two signs of the Casimir force in function of the distance, and also on some alternatives to Einsteinian gravitation with the eventual aim to try to get around the cosmological constant problem