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    Scale Dependence of the Retarded van der Waals Potential

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    We study the ground state energy for a system of two hydrogen atoms coupled to the quantized Maxwell field in the limit α0\alpha \to 0 together with the relative distance between the atoms increasing as αγR\alpha^{-\gamma} R, γ>0\gamma > 0. In particular we determine explicitly the crossover function from the R6R^{-6} van der Waals potential to the R7R^{-7} retarded van der Waals potential, which takes place at scale α2R\alpha^{-2} R.Comment: 19 page
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