Van der Waals forces between cylinders. II. Retarded interaction between thin isotropic rods.

We derive the retarded van der Waals interaction between two long thin parallel dielectric cylinders immersed in a solvent. The result shows that the ultraviolet interactions which may be responsible for the specificity of macromolecular interactions do not operate strongly over distances R >/= 50 A. For greater distances the contribution of these frequencies xi is damped by a factor infinity e(-xiR/c).