Forces between parallel dielectric surfaces

Abstract

The energy of a half‐space‐slab‐half‐space (ε2‐ε1‐ε2) system was considered by a technique which treats all of the electronic degrees of freedom on an equal footing. This is in contrast with earlier work which only considered surface plasmon excitations and their modification due to proximity of the surfaces. The results of the energy so determined were seen to reduce properly in the limiting cases of the separation between the surfaces going to zero or infinity which is also in contrast to the earlier theories. From the total energy the force between the half‐spaces was derived, and it was found that although this varies at large distances as the inverse cube of the separation as was the case for earlier works, the coefficients and detailed behavior are different.