We investigate the van der Waals–London dispersion interactions between a single-walled carbon nanotube immersed in water and interacting with three different objects: an optically isotropic planar substrate, an optically anisotropic planar substrate, and another single-walled carbon nanotube of identical chirality. These interactions were derived from ab initio optical properties and an appropriate formulation of the Lifshitz theory. We derive two analytically tractable limits for the van der Waals interaction: the far limit at separations much larger than the cylinder radius, and the near or Derjaguin limit where surface-cylinder separation is much smaller than the radius. We investigate in detail the effect of relative geometry and the relative separation on the magnitude of the dispersion interaction.

• Received 9 February 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.76.045417