Out of equilibrium relaxation of thermal van der Waals forces

Dean, David

Universite Bordeaux1, Laboratoire d'Ondes et Matiere d'Aquitaine, Physics, Talence, France

We discuss how van der Waals forces can be interpreted in terms of dipole dipole correlations and discuss the dynamics of the correlation process. This allows us to compute the relaxation of the full n-body van der Waals force to its equilibrium value from an initially uncorrelated state. The fluctuations of the resulting van der Waals force is also discussed.

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