1 Introduction
The presence of electromagnetic fluctuations in matter and space is ineludible; they still exist at absolute zero temperature, which are the so-called vacuum fluctuations. As a consequence of these fluctuations, forces between neutral atoms or macroscopic objects arise [1, 2], and they are denominated as van der Waals or Casimir forces. We mention that van der Waals forces are usually associated with interaction of particles or atoms, whereas Casimir forces involve macroscopic objects. The van der Waals forces take part in stability of some inorganic materials [3, 4] as well in biological elements [5, 6]. Also Casimir forces can impact the performance of the motion on micro- and nano-mechanical devices [7]. Recent research of Casimir forces is related to new materials such as metamaterials [8], graphene [9], topological insulators [10], Weyl-semimetals [11], complex geometries [12, 13], as well as conditions out of thermal equilibrium [14, 15]. Since there exists a very vast literature about this topic, we refer to the reader to the following texts [16, 17, 18, 19].
The current technological capabilities for manipulating and fabricating nano- and atomic-structures have allowed the continuous improving of the accuracy for measuring van der Waals or Casimir forces. However, there are still discrepancies between the experimental outcomes and theoretical predictions. There is a long list of causes that gives rise to such discrepancies. For example, since the theoretical formalism of these forces demands the a priori knowledge of the dielectric function of the particles in the whole electromagnetic spectrum, sometimes this information is not available, in other cases, the models of the dielectric function can yield inaccurate estimations of the dielectric response of the material in some spectral ranges [20, 21]. Moreover, the superficial roughness of realistic objects can yield significant deviation of experimental outcomes of the Casimir force from the calculation of the force arising from a smooth surface [22, 23]. Moreover, the van der Waals force between two noble gas atoms was measured with a functionalized tip of an atomic force microscope, obtaining, in comparison with the case of isolated atoms, a stronger interaction due to adsorption effects in the setup; also the van der Waals potential energy deviates from the theoretical power law when heavy atoms interact [24].
Herein we explore another mechanisms that could influence the theoretical outcome. Our aim is to analyze until what extent the van der Waals force between two spherical particles is perturbed when multiple scattering and radiative corrections of the polarizabilities are considered; the influence on the van der Waals force due to the multiple reflections is also examined for two atoms.
Our paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical formalism for obtaining the van der Waals force between two spherical particles when the effect of multiple reflections and radiative corrections of the polarizabilities are taken into account. This section is complemented by two Appendices. In Sec. 3, the results for three different scenarios are shown; van der Waals forces for metallic and dielectric particles, and for a pair of atoms. Section 4 contains the conclusions.
2 Theory
We consider a spherical particle that is located at
To calculate the van der Waals force due to vacuum and thermal fluctuations that is exerted on any of these particles, we require the electric response of an arbitrary electric dipole located at the background medium in presence of the two particles; as will be seen, the electromagnetic field correlations of vacuum and thermal fluctuations are needed for obtaining the force and they depend on this response. Then, the electric response is expressed as
where
where i, j, l = x, y, z,
(
where
The factors
and
The five additive terms of the right-hand side of Eq. (2) correspond respectively to the interacting paths I, II, III, IV, and V of Fig. 1b). The derivation of Green tensor Eq. (2) is found in Appendix A.
2.1 Force
The background medium is vacuum hereafter, thus
Here,
where
By using the properties of the stochastic thermal fields corresponding to our environment, the force Eq. (10) turns out to be
Here,
3 Results
To determine how strong is the impact of the polarizabilities with radiative corrections and the effect of multiple reflections on the van der Waals force, we examine three particular cases. The first one considers that the particles are metallic, whereas the second case involves the interaction between dielectric particles. The last case deals with the force between a pair of atoms. The temperature for all cases is set to T = 0 K, thus only the contribution arising from vacuum fluctuations is considered.
3.1 Metallic Particles
We consider that the size and dielectric functions of the metallic particles are the same, namely, a = ap = as and
where
Figure 2 depicts the force F
z
for several radii of particles as a function of the separation d; three curves are shown for each particle size: (1) the curve that considers only the static polarizabilities of particles without the effect of multiple reflections, denominated simply as “static case"; (2) the curve that comes from polarizabilities with radiative corrections and excludes multiple reflections, denominated as “radiative case"; (3) the curve that takes into account both polarizabilities with radiative corrections and the effect of multiple reflections, named “multireflection case". As seen in the curves of Fig. 2, the information of the force F
z
versus separation d is indirectly provided since the vertical axis of these curves is
By disregarding the effect of the multiple reflections, when a = 2nm (Fig. 2a)), we notice that there is practically no difference between the curves corresponding to the static and radiative cases. However, by comparing Figs. 2a)-d), as the radius of the particles increases, the difference between these curves grows; the strength force for the radiative case is larger than that for the static case. By considering the effect of multiple reflections, we notice that, in comparison with the radiative case, the force is perturbed; as seen in Figs. 2a)-d), the multireflection effect becomes appreciable in the range
3.2 Dielectric particles
We now consider two identical dielectric particles; the nomenclature is the same as previous case (
where
We keep the same shorthand as in previous subsection when we refer to “static", “radiative", and “multireflection" cases. Figure 3 illustrates the force F z versus the separation d for the static, radiative, and multireflection cases and different particle sizes.
We notice that the curves for the static and radiative cases intersect; the crossing point is denoted d
c
. When d < d
c
, the strength of the force is larger for the static case than that for the radiative case. For a particular particle size, the largest difference occurs when d = 2a and it is about 34.6%. On the contrary, when d < d
c
, the magnitude of the force for the radiative case exceeds the one for the static case; maximum difference is about 14.7% and it happens when d = 3.61a. Moreover, the crossing point of the aforementioned curves is located at
that applies, at least, in the range 2 < f < 8 where f is a dimensionless factor.
3.3 Atoms
We extrapolate the Eq. (12) for calculating the van der Waals force between two identical atoms due to vacuum fluctuations. Consequently, we replaced the polarizabilities
where
To find the impact of multiple reflections, we consider the atomic pair Ca-Ca. The atomic radius of Ca is
3.4 Additional remarks
The frequency-integrals have been carried out numerically by the methods of [30, 31]. For illustrative purposes, we have considered simple models for describing the dielectric function of a metal or dielectric. However, the modelling of the dielectric function for a realistic material is more complex. For example, the electric response of a noble metal, in addition to the the contribution of free-electrons, comes from bound electrons (interband transitions) which are important in the optical spectrum; this contribution can be described by using the expression Eq. (18). With this limitation, our results are intended for presenting an estimation of the impact of the effect of multiple reflection and the radiative corrections of the polarizabilities of particles.
4 Conclusions
We have derived the analytical expression for calculating the van der Waals force in a setup composed of two spherical particles that takes into account the multiple reflections and the radiative correction of the polarizabilities (dipole-dipole interaction). To determine the influence of these effects, we have obtained the van der Waals for three particular cases: metallic particles, dielectric particles, and a pair of atoms.
The dielectric response of the metal was described by the Drude metal. In comparison with the case where the aforementioned mechanisms are neglected, the van der Waals force is practically unperturbed by radiative correction of the polarizabilities, whereas the effect of multiple reflections causes a deviation of the force at most of a few percentage points when the spheres are close to each other (
A single oscillator model was considered for the dielectric particles. The van der Waals force suffers a noticeable and peculiar perturbation when the radiation corrections to the polarizabilities are considered. The van der Waals force with these corrections is smaller than that without them when
In the atomic case, the polarizability of each of the atoms is described by a single resonance. The effect of multiple reflections changes with respect to the van der Waals force law d-7; the force difference between these curves at equilibrium separation (
Our work might have repercussions related to fine adjustments between theory and experiments of the van der Waals interaction between particles.