Beyond the Drude model: surface and non-local effects in near-field radiative heat transfer and the Casimir puzzle

TL;DR

This paper investigates surface and non-local effects in near-field radiative heat transfer and the Casimir puzzle, revealing limitations of the Drude model and anisotropic responses in metals near surfaces.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of charge and current responses in semi-infinite metals, highlighting the breakdown of the Drude model and the impact on near-field heat transfer and Casimir forces.

Findings

Surface electrons behave like a damped 2D Fermi gas

Coulomb interaction scales as 1/d^4 instead of 1/d^2

Current response is highly anisotropic near the surface

Abstract

We study the charge and current response functions $P$ and $\Pi$ in a semi-infinite metal block using the electron surface Green's functions. The surface electrons behave similarly to a two-dimensional Fermi gas but are strongly damped due to coupling to the bulk. This substantially reduces the region of validity of the Drude model for $P$, which requires the frequency $\omega \gg \max( v_F q, 1/\tau)$, here $v_F$ is the Fermi velocity, $q$ is the wavevector and $\tau$ is an effective relaxation time. As a consequence, for typical metal in near-field heat transfer, the Coulomb interaction goes as $1/d^4$ with the distance of the vacuum gap instead of the well-known $1/d^2$ of Drude model result. The current response $\Pi$ is shown to be highly anisotropic. The Drude model describes well the transverse directions parallel to the surface but is very different in the normal direction up to about 100 lattice sites away from the surface. These ideas and the residue diamagnetic effect of a nonzero $\Pi$ on the surface at zero frequency still cannot resolve the Casimir puzzle.