Abstract

The van der Waals (v.W) attraction between an atom and a reflecting wall is a quite general phenomena related to a dipole-dipole interaction between a fluctuating atomic dipole and its correlated electric image. A renewed interest for this problem is stimulated by recent development in the field of cavity QED, and by the recent spectroscopic observation¹ of a v.W transition energy shift for an atom near a wall. As long as the surface is an ideal reflector, the v.W interaction always corresponds to an attractive potential H_v.W = V/16z³, whose strength V_i is related to atomic dipolar fluctuations in the |i〉 state In Eq. (1), ${\mu }_{x_i}$ is the dipole operator along x_i, z is the normal to the surface.

© 1994 IEEE