Regimes of the lateral van der Waals force in the presence of dielectrics

• Published in: arXiv.org 2021-11
• Main Authors: Queiroz, Lucas, Nogueira, Edson C M, Alves, Danilo T
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dielectrics; Valleys; Van der Waals forces
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2110.01105

In a recent paper, it was shown that, under the action of the lateral van der Waals (vdW) force due to a perfectly conducting corrugated surface, a neutral anisotropic polarizable particle in vacuum can be attracted not only to the nearest corrugation peak, but also to a valley, or an intermediate point between a peak and a valley, with such behaviors called peak, valley and intermediate regimes, respectively. In the present paper, we investigate how these regimes are affected by the consideration of two non-dispersive semi-infinite dielectrics \(\epsilon_{1}\) and \(\epsilon_{2}\), separated by a corrugated interface. Specifically, we study the vdW interaction between a neutral anisotropic polarizable particle, embedded in the dielectric \(\epsilon_{2}\), and the dielectric \(\epsilon_{1}\). We show that when \(\epsilon_{2}\epsilon_{1}\), one might expect a mere permute between the peak and valley regimes, in comparison to the case \(\epsilon_{2}\epsilon_{1}\) the regimes exhibit a very different and nontrivial behavior. Moreover, we show that similar regimes arise in the classical case involving a neutral polarized particle. The description of how the peak, valley and intermediate regimes are affected by the presence of dielectrics may be relevant for a better understanding of the interaction between anisotropic particles and corrugated surfaces.