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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Unlike deceptively simple electrostatic Coulombic interactions, van der Waals forces can appear complicated. Why? Electrostatic forces depend on only the response to constant electric fields from effectively stationary charges. Electrodynamic van der Waals forces depend on all the possible electromagnetic fields that come out of all possible modes of charges in motion. After learning the language of these fields and motions, seeing how measurements of reflection and absorption turn into calculable forces, and understanding how the electromagnetic wave equations lead us to formulate interactions for a huge variety of materials in variously shaped bodies, we are liberated. What we knew before about charge–charge interactions seems so confining once we can move into a newly accessible area.
The van der Waals interaction depends on the dielectric properties of the materials that interact and that of the medium that separates them.
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