Hide It to See It Better: A Robust Setup to Probe the Thermal Casimir Effect

We describe a Casimir setup consisting of two aligned sinusoidally corrugated Ni surfaces, one of which is hidden by a thin opaque layer of gold with a flat exposed surface. The gold layer acts as a low-pass filter that allows for a clean observation of the controversial thermal Casimir force between the corrugations, with currently available Casimir apparatuses. The proposed scheme of measurement, based on the phase-dependent modulation of the Casimir force, requires no electrostatic calibrations of the apparatus, and is unaffected by uncertainties in the knowledge of the optical properties of the surfaces. This scheme should allow for an unambiguous discrimination between alternative theoretical prescriptions that have been proposed in the literature for the thermal Casimir effect.