Enhancement of long-distance Casimir-Polder interaction between an excited atom and a cavity made of metamaterials

Casimir-Polder interaction between an atom and a dielectric slab

We present an explicit analytic calculation of the energy-level shift of an atom in front of a nondispersive and nondissipative dielectric slab. We work with the fully quantized electromagnetic field, taking retardation into account. We give the shift as a two-dimensional integral and use asymptotic analysis to find expressions for it in various retarded and nonretarded limiting cases. The resu...

Casimir-Polder interaction between an atom and a cylinder with application to nanosystems

Recently the Lifshitz theory of dispersion forces was extended for the case of an atom (molecule) interacting with a plane surface of a uniaxial crystal or with a long solid cylinder or cylindrical shell made of isotropic material or uniaxial crystal. The obtained results are applicable to nanosystems. In particular, we investigate the Casimir-Polder interaction between hydrogen atoms (molecule...

Tailoring optical metamaterials to tune the atom-surface Casimir-Polder interaction

Metamaterials are fascinating tools that can structure not only surface plasmons and electromagnetic waves but also electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations. The possibility of shaping the quantum vacuum is a powerful concept that ultimately allows engineering the interaction between macroscopic surfaces and quantum emitters such as atoms, molecules, or quantum dots. The long-range atom-surface inte...

Casimir-Polder effect with thermally excited surfaces

Thermal Casimir-Polder force between an atom and a dielectric plate: thermodynamics and experiment

The low-temperature behavior of the Casimir-Polder free energy and entropy for an atom near a dielectric plate are found on the basis of the Lifshitz theory. The obtained results are shown to be thermodynamically consistent if the dc conductivity of the plate material is disregarded. With inclusion of dc conductivity, both the standard Lifshitz theory (for all dielectrics) and its generalizatio...