Casimir potentials: a chemical viewpoint

摘要

Retarded dispersion interactions between a pair of molecules are studied within the context of induced dipole moments. The Casimir-Polder potential follows directly from the use of the induced electric dipole which involves the electric polarizability. An essential facet of this approach is that the inducing fields are not only those from the molecules but also the field of the quantum vacuum. The vacuum expectation values of the correlation functions between the fields at different points and at different times allow the interaction energy to be expressed as an integral over frequency; the integrand is the product of the frequency-dependent polarizabilities and an elementary function of the intermolecular separation. The induced moment approach is extended to include induced magnetic moments thus enabling one to find the discriminatory interactions between chiral molecules. The method is also applied to systems with magnetic susceptibilities.