Many-body effects in van der Waals-Casimir interaction between graphene layers

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the van der Waals-Casimir interactions between graphene layers and substrates using Lifshitz theory, highlighting how many-body effects enhance these interactions in multilamellar systems.

Contribution

It provides a detailed theoretical analysis of dispersion interactions in graphene systems, incorporating many-body effects within the Lifshitz framework.

Findings

Many-body effects increase the magnitude of van der Waals-Casimir interactions.

Separation dependence of interactions is characterized and compared with known limits.

The dielectric response of doped and undoped graphene is used in the analysis.

Abstract

Van der Waals-Casimir dispersion interactions between two apposed graphene layers, a graphene layer and a substrate, and in a multilamellar graphene system are analyzed within the framework of the Lifshitz theory. This formulation hinges on a known form of the dielectric response function of an undoped or doped graphene sheet, assumed to be of a random phase approximation form. In the geometry of two apposed layers the separation dependence of the van der Waals-Casimir interaction for both types of graphene sheets is determined and compared with some well known limiting cases. In a multilamellar array the many-body effects are quantified and shown to increase the magnitude of the van der Waals-Casimir interactions.