Casimir-Polder interaction between an atom and a dielectric slab

TL;DR

This paper provides an explicit analytical calculation of the Casimir-Polder energy-level shift of an atom near a dielectric slab, accounting for retardation effects and offering formulas for different regimes.

Contribution

It presents a fully analytical approach to compute atom-surface energy shifts with retardation, applicable to layered microstructures.

Findings

Derived explicit formulas for energy shifts in various regimes

Provided asymptotic expressions for retarded and non-retarded limits

Results applicable to layered microstructure environments

Abstract

We present an explicit analytic calculation of the energy-level shift of an atom in front of a non-dispersive and non-dissipative dielectric slab. We work with the fully quantized electromagnetic field, taking retardation into account. We give the shift as a two-dimensional integral and use asymptotic analysis to find expressions for it in various retarded and non-retarded limiting cases. The results can be used to estimate the energy shift of an atom close to layered microstructures.