An experimental apparatus for Casimir torque measurements

We have developed an experiment to measure the Casimir torque. In our experiment, a solid birefringent crystal causes a nematic liquid crystal director to rotate such that the extraordinary axes are aligned. A transparent and isotropic dielectric spacer layer is used to separate the two birefringent materials and an all-optical technique is used for detection. In this talk, we report on the progress of this experiment.