Casimir-Polder interaction between an atom and a dielectric slab

Abstract

We present an explicit analytic calculation of the energy-level shift of an atom in front of a non-dispersive and non-dissipative dielectric slab. We work with the fully quantized electromagnetic field, taking retardation into account. We give the shift as a two-dimensional integral and use asymptotic analysis to find expressions for it in various retarded and non-retarded limiting cases. The results can be used to estimate the energy shift of an atom close to layered microstructures.