Coherent diffraction of hydrogen through the 246 pm lattice of graphene
- Author(s)
- Christian Brand, Maxime Debiossac, Toma Susi, François Aguillon, Jani Kotakoski, Philippe Roncin, Markus Arndt
- Abstract
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(s)
- Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics and Quantum Information, Physics of Nanostructured Materials
- External organisation(s)
- Université Paris-Saclay
- Journal
- New Journal of Physics
- Volume
- 21
- No. of pages
- 8
- ISSN
- 1367-2630
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ab05ed
- Publication date
- 02-2019
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103018 Materials physics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Physics and Astronomy(all)
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/coherent-diffraction-of-hydrogen-through-the-246-pm-lattice-of-graphene(0945aa48-3d8b-4dbc-9af9-20c210ede272).html