1203.2732 (Nail R. Khusnutdinov)

The thermal Casimir-Polder interaction of an atom with spherical plasma
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Nail R. Khusnutdinov

The van der Waals and Casimir-Polder interaction energy of an atom with an infinitely thin sphere with finite conductivity is investigated in the framework of the hydrodynamic approach at finite temperature. The Lifshits approach is used to find the free energy. We find the close expression for the free energy and make the analysis of it for i) high and low temperatures, ii) large radii of sphere and ii) short distance from sphere. At low temperatures the thermal part of the free energy tends to zero as forth power of the temperature while for high temperatures it is proportional to the first degree of the temperature. We show that the entropy of this system is positive for small radii of sphere and it becomes negative at low temperatures and for large radii of the sphere.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2732