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Van der Waals forces between an atom and a surface
Abstract
The theory of electrical images is used to derive Van der Waals forces at the surface of a solid, which is treated as a continuous dielectric medium. The theory gives the attraction between a single atom and the surface, between two atoms which are both close to the surface and between two bodies separated by a gap. The forces come out in terms of the dielectric constant of the solid and the electric polarizability of the atom at imaginary frequencies. The method of images breaks down at distances greater than about 500 å, and an exact treatment of the electromagnetic field fluctuations near the surface leads to the same force as Lifshitz's general theory.
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Citations
Cited by
Van der Waals forces and zero-point energy for dielectric and permeable materials
Boyer, T. H. (1974) · Physical Review A · doi:10.1103/physreva.9.2078 · Cited by 317
Macroscopic quantum electrodynamics - Concepts and applications
Scheel, S., & Buhmann, S. (2008) · Acta Physica Slovaca. Reviews and Tutorials · doi:10.2478/v10155-010-0092-x · Cited by 300
Metadata
- Authors
- McLachlan, A. D.
- Venue
- Molecular Physics
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 1964-01-01
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 381-388
- ISSN
- 0026-8976 (ISSN-L)
- 1362-3028
- OpenAlex
- W2011426395
- Cited by
- 392
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 3.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- McLachlan, A. D. (1964). Van der Waals forces between an atom and a surface. Molecular Physics. https://doi.org/10.1080/00268976300101141
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
