Premelting and formation of ice due to Casimir-Lifshitz interactions: Impact of improved parameterization for materials

TL;DR

This paper revisits the Casimir-Lifshitz interactions responsible for ice premelting, incorporating improved dielectric data to better understand stable configurations and the influence of material properties on these phenomena.

Contribution

It extends previous analyses by integrating updated dielectric functions for ice and water, correcting earlier errors, and exploring stability conditions in multilayer configurations.

Findings

Stable configurations depend on initial conditions.

Updated dielectric data significantly affect Casimir-Lifshitz energies.

Multiple stability types are demonstrated in multilayer systems.

Abstract

Recently, the premelting and formation of ice due to the Casimir-Lifshitz interaction, proposed in early 1990s by Elbaum and Schick [Phys. Rev. Lett. 66, 1713-1716 (1991)], have been generalized to diverse practical scenarios, yielding novel physical intuitions and possibilities of application for those phenomena. The properties of materials, in particular, the electrical permittivity and permeability, exert significant influences on the Casimir-Cifshitz energies and forces, and hence on the corresponding premelting and formation of ice. To address these influences in detail and explore the resulting physics, here we revisit and extend the analyses of previous work, with both the dielectric data utilized there and the latest dielectric functions for ice and cold water. While our previous results are rederived, an error there has also been spotted. For the four-layer cases considered by some of us, the existence of stable configurations depending on the initial conditions has been confirmed, and different types of stability corresponding to minima of the Casimir-Lifshitz free energy are demonstrated. As the new dielectric functions for ice and cold water deviate considerably from those used by Elbaum and Schick, their vital impacts on three- and four-layer configurations are therefore being reconsidered.