van der Waals coefficients for alkali-metal atoms in material media

The C-3 coefficients and their ratios for the alkali-metal atoms are determined very accurately by taking into account the optical properties of the atoms and four distinct types of trapping materials such as Au (metal), Si (semiconductor), vitreous SiO2 (dielectric), and SiN x (dielectric). Dynamic dipole polarizabilities are calculated precisely for the alkali-metal atoms that produce C-3 coefficients in a perfectly conducting medium within 0.2% accuracy. Thus, uncertainties from the atomic polarizabilities in the evaluation of the material-dependent C-3 coefficients are small and accuracies of these C-3 values mainly rely on the used optical data which are not taken into account in the present work. Our findings are in very good agreement with the available measurements, but they differ by around 10% from the previously reported high-precision calculations in heavy atoms for the perfect conductors. We also revisit the dispersion coefficients for the alkali-metal dimers and evaluate them using the above dynamic dipole polarizabilities which provide slightly different error bars than the other reported precise results. These coefficients are fitted into a ready-to-use functional form to aid the experimentalists in finding out the interaction potential only with the knowledge of atom-wall distance.