Coherent diffraction of hydrogen through the 246 pm lattice of graphene

Autor(en)

Christian Brand, Maxime Debiossac, Toma Susi, François Aguillon, Jani Kotakoski, Philippe Roncin, Markus Arndt

Abstrakt

We study the diffraction of neutral hydrogen atoms through suspended single-layer graphene using molecular dynamics simulations based on density functional theory. Although the atoms have to overcome a transmission barrier, we find that the de Broglie wave function for Hat 80 eV has a high probability to be coherently transmitted through about 18% of the graphene area, contrary to the case of He. We propose an experiment to realize the diffraction of atoms at the natural hexagon lattice period of 246 pm, leading to a more than 400-fold increase in beam separation of the coherently split atomic wave function compared to diffraction experiments at state-of-the art nano-machined masks. We expect this unusual wide coherent beam splitting to give rise to novel applications in atom interferometry.

Organisation(en)

Quantenoptik, Quantennanophysik und Quanteninformation, Physik Nanostrukturierter Materialien

Externe Organisation(en)

Université Paris Saclay

Journal

New Journal of Physics

Band

21

Anzahl der Seiten

8

ISSN

1367-2630

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ab05ed

Publikationsdatum

02-2019

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

103018 Materialphysik

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Allgemeine Physik und Astronomie

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/0945aa48-3d8b-4dbc-9af9-20c210ede272