  Recently, the premelting and formation of ice due to the Casimir-Lifshitz
interaction, proposed in early 1990s by Elbaum and Schick [Phys. Rev. Lett. 66,
1713-1716 (1991)], have been generalized to diverse practical scenarios,
yielding novel physical intuitions and possibilities of application for those
phenomena. The properties of materials, in particular, the electrical
permittivity and permeability, exert significant influences on the
Casimir-Cifshitz energies and forces, and hence on the corresponding premelting
and formation of ice. To address these influences in detail and explore the
resulting physics, here we revisit and extend the analyses of previous work,
with both the dielectric data utilized there and the latest dielectric
functions for ice and cold water. While our previous results are rederived, an
error there has also been spotted. For the four-layer cases considered by some
of us, the existence of stable configurations depending on the initial
conditions has been confirmed, and different types of stability corresponding
to minima of the Casimir-Lifshitz free energy are demonstrated. As the new
dielectric functions for ice and cold water deviate considerably from those
used by Elbaum and Schick, their vital impacts on three- and four-layer
configurations are therefore being reconsidered.
