Casimir interaction between gas media of excited atoms

Abstract

The retarded dispersion interaction (Casimir interaction) between two dilute dielectric media at high temperatures is considered. The excited atoms are taken into account. It is shown that the perturbation technique cannot be applied to this problem due to divergence of integrals. A non-perturbative approach based on kinetic Green functions is implemented. We consider the interaction between two atoms (one of them is excited) embedded in an absorbing dielectric medium. We take into account the possible absorption of photons in the medium, which solves the problem of divergence. The force between two plane dilute dielectric media is calculated at pair interaction approximation. We show that the result of quantum electrodynamics differs from the Lifshitz formula for dilute gas media at high temperatures (if the number of excited atoms is significant). According to quantum electrodynamics, the interaction may be either attractive or repulsive depending on the temperature and the density numbers of the media.