Surface enhanced van der Waals force

We consider the van der Waals interaction of an excited atom and a ground-state atom across a vacuum-medium interface under the circumstances of the resonant coupling of the excited atom to a surface polariton mode of the system. We demonstrate that the nonretarded interaction potential between the atoms is, in this case, the same as in an effective medium described by the average dielectric function of the media in contact, except for the different local-field correction factor. The estimate performed for the vacuum-sapphire interface shows that the nonretarded van der Waals (atom*-atom) force can be at the surface-mode resonance enhanced by almost three orders of magnitude in comparison to its free-space value. Owing to the local-field effect in the present configuration, this enhancement factor is larger than previously estimated for atoms in front of the same medium by (almost) an order of magnitude.