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 ≥ 50Å. For greater distances the contribution of these frequencies ξ is damped by a factor ∞e-ξR/c