Related papers: Quantum reflection of helium atom beams from a mic…
Quantum reflection is a universal property of atoms and molecules when scattered from surfaces in ultracold collisions. Recent experimental work has documented the quantum reflection and diffraction of He atoms, dimers, trimers and Neon…
We here report coherent reflection of thermal He atom beams from various microscopically rough surfaces at grazing incidence. For a sufficiently small normal component $k_z$ of the incident wave-vector of the atom the reflection probability…
Thermal energy atom scattering at a surface with grazing incidence conditions is an innovative method for investigating dispersive atom-surface interactions with potential application in quantum sensing interferometry. The complete…
We present first experimental data on the high energy behavior of helium atoms quantum reflecting from the nanoscopically disordered surface of a quartz crystal. The use of the light, stable and inert He atom not only opens the unique…
We report on the observation of emerging beam resonances, well known as Rayleigh-Wood anomalies and threshold resonances in photon and electron diffraction, respectively, in an atom-optical diffraction experiment. Diffraction of He atom…
We show that periodically doped, flat surfaces can act as reflective diffraction gratings for atomic and molecular matter waves. The diffraction element is realized by exploiting that charged dopants locally suppress quantum reflection from…
The strength of an atom-surface interaction is determined by studying atom diffraction from a rotated material grating. A phasor diagram is developed to interpret why diffraction orders are never completely suppressed when a complex…
Quantum reflection of thermal He atoms from various surfaces (glass slide, GaAs wafer, flat and structured Cr) at grazing conditions is studied within the elastic close-coupling formalism. Comparison with the experimental results of B.S.…
The specular reflectivity of slow, metastable neon atoms from a silicon surface was found to increase markedly when the flat surface was replaced by a grating structure with parallel narrow ridges. For a surface with ridges that have a…
Typically one expects that when a heavy particle collides with a surface, the scattered angular distribution will follow classical mechanics. The heavy mass assures that the de Broglie wavelength of the incident particle in the direction of…
In atom optics a material structure is commonly regarded as an amplitude mask for atom waves. However, atomic diffraction patterns formed using material gratings indicate that material structures also operate as phase masks. In this study a…
Atomic diffraction through double slits and transmission gratings is well described in terms of the associated de Broglie waves and classical wave optics. However, for weakly bound and relatively large systems, such as the He_2 dimer, this…
Experimental diffraction patterns produced by grazing scattering of fast helium atoms from a Ag(110) surface are used as a sensitive tool to test both the scattering and the potential models. To describe the elastic collision process we…
Atom-surface interactions can significantly modify the intensity and phase of atom de Broglie waves diffracted by a silicon nitride grating. This affects the operation of a material grating as a coherent beam splitter. The phase shift…
We observed quantum reflection of ultracold atoms from the attractive potential of a solid surface. Extremely dilute Bose-Einstein condensates of ^{23}Na, with peak density 10^{11}-10^{12}atoms/cm^3, confined in a weak gravito-magnetic trap…
We describe an experimentally realistic situation of the quantum reflection of helium atoms from an oscillating surface. The temporal modulation of the potential induces clear sidebands in the reflection probability as a function of…
Lasers with wavelengths of the order of the atomic size are becoming available. We explore the behavior of light-matter interactions in this emergent field by considering the atomic Kapitza-Dirac effect. We derive the diffraction patterns,…
Among the fundamental quantum effects, quantum reflection (QR) is one of the most notable phenomena. Approximating arbitrary potentials in the Schr\"odinger equation as multistep potentials allows us to determine the reflection coefficient…
We have studied atomic diffraction at normal incidence from an evanescent standing wave with a high resolution using velocity selective Raman transitions. We have observed up to 3 resolved orders of diffraction, which are well accounted for…
The wave function of an atom passed through a diffraction grating acquires a regular space structure and the interaction of another particle with this atom can be thought of as scattering on a 'quantum grating' composed of a single atom.…