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We study the physical content of the electromagnetic vacuum energy of arandom medium made of atomic electric dipoles. First, we evaluate thecontribution of statistical fluctuations to the average total vacuum energy,which is made out of the integration of the variations of the Lamb shift withrespect to the coupling constant. While the Lamb shift is a function of theelectrical susceptibility only, the vacuum energy is generally not. Second, wemake clear why the effective medium bulk energy does not account for the totalvacuum energy of a molecular dielectric. Consequently, the Lamb shift does notderive from the effective medium bulk energy except at leading order in themolecular density. The local field factors provide natural cutoffs for thespectrum of the total vacuum energy at a wavelength of the order of thecorrelation length. Third, we investigate to what extent shifts in the spectrumof the dielectric constant may be attributed to the binding energy of adielectric. In particular, in the continuum approximation we have found arelation between the electrostatic binding energy and the Lorentz-Lorenz shift.Nonetheless, we conclude that the knowledge of the spectrum of the refractiveindex is insufficient either to quantify the energy of radiative modes or toestimate the electrostatic binding energy of molecular clusters.

Electromagnetic vacuum of complex media II: the Lamb shift and the total vacuum energy