LAUSR

Phonon Casimir effect describes the interaction between impurities mediated by their host's phonons. This coupling persists even at zero-temperature due to vacuum fluctuations of the phonon field. It has been shown that in one dimension, the interaction between finite-mass impurities decays as a quasi-power law of their separation. The power depends on the mass of the impurities and the distance between them, approaching the inverse-cube dependence for large separations. Here, the analysis is extended to the finite-temperature case. It is demonstrated that increasing the number of phonons by raising the temperature uniformly throughout the system actually weakens the attraction between impurities. At the same time, non-uniform heating can be used to augment the phonon-mediated interaction.