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New Prospects for de Broglie Interferometry

Grating Diffraction in the Far-Field and Poisson’s Spot in the Near-Field

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Abstract

We consider various effects that are encountered in matter wave interference experiments with massive nanoparticles. The text-book example of far-field interference at a grating is compared with diffraction into the dark field behind an opaque aperture, commonly designated as Poisson’s spot or the spot of Arago. Our estimates indicate that both phenomena may still be observed in a mass range exceeding present-day experiments by at least two orders of magnitude. They both require, however, the development of sufficiently cold, intense and coherent cluster beams. While the observation of Poisson’s spot offers the advantage of non-dispersiveness and a simple distinction between classical and quantum fringes in the absence of particle wall interactions, van der Waals forces may severely limit the distinguishability between genuine quantum wave diffraction and classically explicable spots already for moderately polarizable objects and diffraction elements as thin as 100 nm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, Boltzmanngasse 5, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Thomas Juffmann, Stefan Nimmrichter & Markus Arndt

  2. Institut für Nanotechnologie, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Postfach 36 40, 76021, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Herbert Gleiter

  3. Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Str. 38, 01187, Dresden, Germany

    Klaus Hornberger

Authors
  1. Thomas Juffmann
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  2. Stefan Nimmrichter
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  3. Markus Arndt
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  4. Herbert Gleiter
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  5. Klaus Hornberger
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Markus Arndt.

Additional information

This paper is dedicated to Daniel Greenberger and Helmut Rauch, two pioneers in explorations of the foundations of quantum physics.

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Juffmann, T., Nimmrichter, S., Arndt, M. et al. New Prospects for de Broglie Interferometry. Found Phys 42, 98–110 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-010-9520-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-010-9520-5

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