Medium-assisted van der Waals dispersion interactions involving chiral molecules

TL;DR

This paper derives comprehensive formulas for van der Waals dispersion interactions between chiral molecules in complex media, accounting for electric, magnetic, and chiral properties, and explores their behavior in different distance regimes.

Contribution

It provides a complete set of unified formulas for dispersion interactions involving chiral molecules and magnetoelectric media, extending previous literature.

Findings

Formulas include electric, paramagnetic, diamagnetic, and chiral interactions.

Unified expressions using electric-magnetic duality.

Analysis of retarded and non-retarded limits in free space.

Abstract

The van der Waals dispersion interaction between two chiral molecules in the presence of arbirary magnetoelectric media is derived using perturbation theory. To be general, the molecular polarisabilities are assumed to be of electric, paramagnetic and diamagnetic natures and the material environment is considered to possess a chiral electromagnetic response. The derived formulas of electric-chiral, paramagnetic-chiral, diamagnetic-chiral and chiral-chiral interaction potentials when added to the previously obtained contributions in literature, form a complete set of dispersion interaction formulas. We present them in a unified form making use of electric--magnetic duality. As an application, the case of two anisotropic molecules in free space is considered where we drive the retarded and non-retarded limits with respect to intermolecular distance.