Scarf for Lifshitz

Abstract

Polarization of a vacuum as well as of dispersive and dissipative dielectric media with piece-wise and smooth inhomogeneities is studied with the goal to clarify the question of renormalizability of diverging electromagnetic stress-energy tensor. First, the stress tensor is computed with the Lifshitz approach to London forces in the non-retarded limit, which after the substraction of the leading free space ultraviolet divergencies still retains the divergencies associated with the presence of sharp boundaries between piece-wise inhomogeneities. We call these contributions finite because they become renormalized after a sharp interface is replaced with a dielectric permittivity changing according to a smooth function of spatial coordinates. In addition, such a smoothed out interface exhibits new subleading ultraviolet divergencies that appear due to its internal structure. To systematically deal with the polarization of inhomogeneous media, the Hadamard expansion is applied to single out both finite and subleading contributions and to unequivocally demonstrate incomplete renormalizability of the Lifshitz theory. The above approach also allows us to reveal the nature of surface tension, which proves to be purely quantum mechanical. The deduced theory of surface tension and its calculations for real dielectric media are favorably compared to the available experimental data. While the sharp interface limit recovers the classical boundary conditions for the electric field and uncovers the origin of the apparent local divergencies of the renormalized stresses in the sharp interface formulation previously pointed out in the literature, the problem of surface tension proves to be of a distinguished limit type because the sharp interface formulation loses the information about the internal structure of an interface and hence cannot explain the origin of surface tension.