Paper in New J. Phys.

15.03.2019

"Coherent diffraction of hydrogen through the 246 pm lattice of graphene", has been published in New Journal of Physics!

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 H at 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.

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Intensity of the diffraction peaks as a function of the transferred in-plane momentum at Ekin=80 eV. For L1=1 m theshown region corresponds to 58×58 cm².