Related papers: Determination of Atom-Surface van der Waals Potent…
Highly polarizable metastable He* ($\mathrm{2^3S}$) and Ne* ($\mathrm{2^3P}$) atoms have been diffracted from a 100 nm period silicon nitride transmission grating and the van der Waals coefficients $C_3$ for the interaction of the excited…
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…
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 study the coherent inelastic diffraction of very weakly bound two body clusters from a material transmission grating. We show that internal transitions of the clusters can lead to new separate peaks in the diffraction pattern whose…
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…
Four atom optics experiments that each serve to measure atom-surface interactions near nanofabricated gratings are presented here. In these experiments atoms in a beam travel within 25 nm of a material grating bar, and the analysis…
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…
We report improved precision measurements of the Van der Waals potential strength ($C_3$) for Na atoms and a silicon-nitride (SiN$_x$) surface. We studied diffraction from nano-fabricated gratings with a particular "magic" open-fraction…
We observe high-resolution diffraction patterns of a thermal-energy helium-atom beam reflected from a microstructured surface grating at grazing incidence. The grating consists of 10-$\mu$m-wide Cr strips patterned on a quartz substrate and…
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…
The van der Waals atom-surface attraction, scaling as C3 z-3 for z the atom-surface distance, is expected to be valid in the distance range 1-1000 nm, covering 8-10 orders of magnitudes in the interaction energy. A Cs vapour nanocell allows…
We derive from first principles the expression for the angular/wavelength distribution of the intensity diffracted by a blazed reflective grating, according to a scalar theory of diffraction. We considered the most common case of a groove…
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…
We evaluate separation dependent van der Waal dispersion ($C_3$) coefficients for the interactions of the Li, Na, K and Rb alkali atoms with a graphene layer and with a single walled carbon nanotube (CNT) using the hydrodynamic and Dirac…
A method for diffracting the weak probe beam into unidirectional and higher-order directions is proposed via a novel Rydberg electromagnetically induced grating, providing a new way for the implementations of quantum devices with cold…
We develop a versatile theoretical approach to the study of cold-atom diffractive scattering from light-field gratings by combining calculations of the optical near-field, generated by evanescent waves close to the surface of periodic…
In the framework of the approximation of slowly varying amplitudes a multiwave dynamical theory of neutron diffraction on a moving phase grating was developed. The influence of the velocity of the grating, its period and height of the slits…
Largely motivated by a number of applications, the van der Waals dispersion coefficients ($C_3$s) of the alkali ions (Li$^+$, Na$^+$, K$^+$ and Rb$^+$), the alkaline-earth ions (Ca$^+$, Sr$^+$, Ba$^+$ and Ra$^+$) and the inert gas atoms…
We present semiempirical calculations of long-range van der Waals interactions for two interacting metastable rare-gas atoms Ne through Xe. Dispersion coefficients $C_6$ are obtained for homonuclear molecular potentials asymptotically…
The high sensitivity of Laser Spectroscopy has made possible the exploration of atomic resonances in newly designed "nanometric" gas cells, whose local thickness varies from 20nm to more than 1000 nm. Following the initial observation of…