We show that for nanoparticles with giant polarizability (a prominent example being the recently studied Na 14 F 13 molecular clusters) van der Waals forces are significantly enhanced at interparticle distances shorter than. For an adequate description of this phenomenon, nonlinear effects must be taken into account. We show that, contrary to some theoretical claims, an accurate treatment of nonlinearity does not lead to any repulsive forces.
We study the van der Waals interaction of a metallic or narrow-gap semiconducting nanowire with a surface, in the regime of intermediate wire-surface distances (vF /c)L ≪ d ≪ L or L ≪ d ≪ (c/vF )L, where L is the nanowire length, d is the distance to the surface, and vF is the characteristic velocity of nanowire electrons (for a metallic wire, it is the Fermi velocity). Our approach, based on the Luttinger liquid framework, allows one to analyze the dependence of the interaction on the interplay between the nanowire length, wire-surface distance, and characteristic length scales related to the spectral gap and temperature. We show that this interplay leads to nontrivial modifications of the power law that governs van der Waals forces, in particular to a non-monotonic dependence of the power law exponent on the wire-surface separation.
Abstract. We show that a nanoparticle with a "giant" polarizability α (i.e., with the polarizability volume 0 4πε α = α′ significantly exceeding the particle volume) placed in the vicinity of a surface experiences a strongly increased van der Waals force at distances comparable or smaller than the characteristic scale ( ). At distances close to R 0 , the oscillation mode of the particle dipole moment softens, so nonlinear polarizability must be taken into account to describe the particle-surface interaction. It is shown that a proper treatment of nonlinear effects results in the van der Waals force that is free of divergences and repulsive contributions.
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