Curvature effects on the regimes of the lateral van der Waals force

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown that, under the action of the lateral van der Waals (vdW) force due to a perfectly conducting corrugated plane, a neutral anisotropic polarizable particle in vacuum can be attracted not only to the nearest corrugation peak but also to a valley or an intermediate point between a peak and a valley, with such behaviors called the peak, valley, and intermediate regimes, respectively. In the present paper, we calculate the vdW interaction between a polarizable particle and a grounded conducting corrugated cylinder, and investigate how the effects of the curvature of the cylinder affect the occurrence of the mentioned regimes.