MANY-BODY OPTICS .2. DIELECTRIC CONSTANT FORMULATION OF BINDING ENERGY OF A MOLECULAR FLUID

For Pt I see abstr. 37680 of a1968. Indicates how the microscopic optical scattering theory already reported elsewhere can be developed into a theory of the binding energy of a molecular fluid. The author first reports (k, omega ) dependent dielectric constants for the molecular fluid: these determine the linear response in all processes which depend on virtual optical processes alone. He then briefly describes bulk contributions to the stopping power, to the emission of Cerenkov radiation and to the collective molecular binding in terms of these dielectric constants. Full account is taken of the radiation field at every order in the ensemble averaged polarization diagram approximation and we extend the theory of the non-relativistic Lamb shift. It is shown that, in the continuum approximation which neglects thermal fluctuations, the molecular binding energy is completely determined by the frequency spectrum of the transverse complex refractive index. A numerical estimate is made of the importance of strictly transverse contributions to the binding energy in this approximation.