We study the quantum reflection of ultracold antihydrogen atoms bouncing on the surface of a liquid helium film. The Casimir-Polder potential and quantum reflection are calculated for different thicknesses of the film supported by different substrates. Antihydrogen can be protected from anni- hilation for as long as 1.3s on a bulk of liquid 4He, and 1.7s for liquid 3He. These large lifetimes open interesting perspectives for spectroscopic measurements of the free fall acceleration of antihydrogen. Variation of the scattering length with the thickness of a film of helium shows interferences which we interpret through a Liouville transformation of the quantum reflection problem.
@article{arxiv.1709.07724,
title = {Quantum reflection of antihydrogen from a liquid helium film},
author = {P. -P. Crépin and E. A. Kupriyanova and R. Guérout and A. Lambrecht and V. V. Nesvizhevsky and S. Reynaud and S. Vasiliev and A. Yu. Voronin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.07724},
year = {2017}
}