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It is an undisputed textbook fact that non-retarded van der Waals (vdW)interactions between isotropic dimers are attractive, regardless of thepolarizability of the interacting systems or spatial dimensionality. Theuniversality of vdW attraction is attributed to the dipolar coupling betweenfluctuating electron charge densities. Here we demonstrate that the long-rangeinteraction between \textit{spatially confined} vdW dimers becomes repulsivewhen accounting for the full Coulomb interaction between charge fluctuations.Our analytic results are obtained by using the Coulomb potential as aperturbation over dipole-correlated states for two quantum harmonic oscillatorsembedded in spaces with reduced dimensionality, however the long-rangerepulsion is expected to be a general phenomenon for spatially-confined quantumsystems. We suggest optical experiments to test our predictions, analyze theirrelevance in the context of intermolecular interactions in nanoscaleenvironments, and rationalize the recent observation of anomalously strongscreening of the lateral vdW interactions between aromatic hydrocarbonsadsorbed on metal surfaces.

Long-Range Repulsion Between Spatially Confined van der Waals Dimers