Coherent diffraction of hydrogen through the 246 pm lattice of graphene. (15th March 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Brand, Christian; Debiossac, Maxime; Susi, Toma; Aguillon, François; Kotakoski, Jani; Roncin, Philippe; Arndt, Markus
• Is Part Of: New journal of physics. Volume 21:Number 3(2019:Mar.)
• Publication Date: 2019-03-15
• Subjects: matter-wave diffraction -- 2D materials -- density functional theory -- atomic interference; Physics -- Periodicals; Physics; Periodicals; 530.05
• DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/ab05ed
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1367-2630

Abstract

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 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.