Anomalous magnetic moment of an electron near a dispersive surface

Changes in the magnetic moment of an electron near a dielectric or conducting surface due to boundary-dependent radiative corrections are investigated. The electromagnetic field is quantized by normal mode expansion for a nondispersive dielectric and an undamped plasma, but the electron is described by the Dirac equation without matter-field quantization. Perturbation theory in the Dirac equation leads to a general formula for the magnetic-moment shift in terms of integrals over products of electromagnetic mode functions. In each of the models investigated, contour integration techniques over a complex wave vector can be used to derive a general formula featuring just integrals over transverse electric and transverse magnetic reflection coefficients of the surface. Analysis of the magnetic-moment shift for several classes of materials yields markedly different results from the previously considered simplistic “perfect-reflector” model, due to the inclusion of physically important features of the electromagnetic response of the surface such as evanescent field modes and dispersion in the material. For a general dispersive dielectric surface, the magnetic-moment shift of a nearby electron can exceed the previous prediction of the perfect-reflector model by several orders of magnitude.