FRICTION FORCE BETWEEN MOVING HARMONIC-OSCILLATORS

When two dielectric media separated by a small distance move with resp ect to each other, friction forces arise, as a consequence of the van der Waals forces between the constituent molecules. The friction effec t was first considered by Levitov (1989), with the use of field theore tical methods. In the present work the effect is examined from various angles using methods from quantum statistical mechanics. The theory i s kept on the molecular level, in that we consider the fundamental pro blem of two, weakly interacting, harmonic oscillators moving slowly wi th respect to each other