Abstract
The authors give a derivation of the van der Waals free energy of interaction between two semi-infinite media. The treatment, which includes the case of magnetic and conducting media, is valid for all temperatures and includes retardation effects. The method is an extension of one used by van Kampen (1968) and considers the free energy of electromagnetic surface modes in the region between the two media. The result reduces to that derived using Green function techniques by Lifshitz et al. (1961) for nonmagnetic media.

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