Nonadditivity of Optical and Casimir-Polder Potentials

Nonadditivity of critical Casimir forces

In soft condensed matter physics, effective interactions often emerge due to the spatial confinement of fluctuating fields. For instance, microscopic particles dissolved in a binary liquid mixture are subject to critical Casimir forces whenever their surfaces confine the thermal fluctuations of the order parameter of the solvent close to its critical demixing point. These forces are theoretical...

Microscopic Origin of Casimir-Polder Forces

Abstract. We establish a general relation between dispersion forces. First, based on QED in causal media, leading-order perturbation theory is used to express both the single-atom CasimirPolder and the two-atom van der Waals potentials in terms of the atomic polarizabilities and the Green tensor for the body-assisted electromagnetic field. Endowed with this geometryindependent framework, we the...

Measurement of the Casimir-Polder force.

Scalar Casimir-Polder forces for uniaxial corrugations

We investigate the Dirichlet-scalar equivalent of Casimir-Polder forces between an atom and a surface with arbitrary uniaxial corrugations. The complexity of the problem can be reduced to a one-dimensional Green’s function equation along the corrugation which can be solved numerically. Our technique is fully nonperturbative in the height profile of the corrugation. We present explicit results f...

Lateral Casimir-Polder force with corrugated surfaces

We derive the lateral Casimir-Polder force on a ground state atom on top of a corrugated surface, up to first order in the corrugation amplitude. Our calculation is based on the scattering approach, which takes into account nonspecular reflections and polarization mixing for electromagnetic quantum fluctuations impinging on real materials. We compare our first order exact result with two common...