Quantum corrections to the classical electrostatic interaction between induced dipoles

We study, in the presence of an external electrostatic field, the interatomic interaction between two ground-state atoms coupled with vacuum electromagnetic fluctuations within the dipole coupling approximation based on the perturbation theory. We show that, up to the fourth order, the electrostatic-field-induced interatomic interaction is just the classical dipole-dipole interaction, which disagrees with the recent result from Fiscelli et al. [G. Fiscelli et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 013604 (2020)]. However, to higher orders, there exist external-field-related quantum corrections to the induced classical electrostatic dipole-dipole interaction. In the sixth order, the external field effectively modifies the atomic polarizability to give rise to a two-photon-exchange quantum correction, while in the eighth order, the external field enables an additional process of three-photon exchange which is not allowed in the absence of the external field, and this process generates an \(r^{-11}\) term in the interaction potential in the far regime, where \(r\) is the interatomic separation. Numerical estimations show that these external-field-related quantum corrections are much smaller than the two-photon-exchange Casimir-Polder interaction.