Retarded room temperature Hamaker coefficients between bulk elemental metals

TL;DR

This paper systematically calculates retarded room temperature Hamaker coefficients for 26 elemental metals using Lifshitz theory, providing accurate spectral methods and a new semi-empirical formula for separation dependence.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive calculation of Hamaker coefficients for metals with spectral methods and proposes a novel semi-empirical expression for their separation dependence.

Findings

Accurate Hamaker coefficients for 26 metals in vacuum and water.

Quantification of Lifshitz approximation accuracy.

A new semi-empirical formula for separation dependence.

Abstract

The exact Lifshitz theory is utilized for the systematic calculation of the retarded room temperature Hamaker coefficients between 26 identical isotropic elemental metals embedded in vacuum or pure water. The full spectral method, complemented with a Drude model low frequency extrapolation, is employed for metals with input from extended-in-frequency dielectric data, while the simple spectral method is employed for water with input from three dielectric representations. The accuracy of common Lifshitz approximations is quantified. A novel compact semi-empirical expression is proposed for the separation-dependence of the Hamaker coefficient that is demonstrated to be very accurate for all combinations.