Surface Enhanced van der Waals force

TL;DR

This paper investigates how surface polariton modes can significantly enhance the van der Waals force between an excited and a ground state atom near an interface, with potential increases up to three orders of magnitude.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the nonretarded van der Waals interaction is equivalent to that in an effective medium and shows a substantial enhancement at surface mode resonance, considering local-field effects.

Findings

Van der Waals force can be enhanced by nearly three orders of magnitude at surface resonance.

The local-field correction increases the enhancement factor compared to previous estimates.

The effective medium approach simplifies the calculation of atom-atom interactions near interfaces.

Abstract

We consider the van der Waals interaction of an excited atom and a ground state atom across a vacuum-medium interface under the circumstances of the resonant coupling of the excited atom to a surface polariton mode of the system. We demonstrate that the nonretarded interaction potential between the atoms is in this case the same as in an effective medium described by the average dielectric function of the media in contact except for the different local-field correction factor. The estimate performed for the vacuum-sapphire interface shows that the nonretarded van der Waals (atom*-atom) force can be at the surface mode resonance enhanced by almost three orders of magnitude in comparison with its free-space value. Owing to the local-field effect in the present configuration this enhancement factor is larger then previously estimated for atoms in front of the same medium by (almost) an order of magnitude.