A Kapitza–Dirac–Talbot–Lau interferometer for highly polarizable molecules

By S. Gerlich, L. Hackermueller, K. Hornberger, A. Stibor, Hendrik Ulbricht, M. Gring, F. Goldfarb, T. Savas, M. Mueri, M. Mayor and 1 more. 2007

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research on matter waves is a thriving field of quantum physics and has recently stimulated many investigations with electrons1, neutrons2, atoms3, Bose-condensed ensembles4, cold clusters5 and hot molecules6. Coherence experiments with complex objects are of interest for exploring the transition to classical physics7,8,9, for measuring molecular properties10, and they have even been proposed for testing new models of space-time11. For matter-wave experiments with complex molecules, the strongly dispersive effect of the interaction between the diffracted molecule and the grating wall is a major challenge because it imposes enormous constraints on the velocity selection of the molecular beam12. Here, we describe the first experimental realization of a new set-up that solves this problem by combining the advantages of a so-called Talbot–Lau interferometer13 with the benefits of an optical phase grating.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc2e3f1dd8d4839c7e651e15b43c25154a37f72d

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Discriminatory optical force for chiral molecules (2014, methodology): “21) has also been utilized successfully in this regime in various experiments [57, 62–64, 105].”
Colloquium: Quantum interference of clusters and molecules (2011, background): “The problem of van der Waals forces can be eliminated by another interferometer scheme: following the demonstration of an optical phase grating for fullerenes by Nairz et al. (2001) a new interferometer was proposed by Brezger et al. (2003) and implemented by Gerlich et al. (2007).”
Models of Wave-function Collapse, Underlying Theories, and Experimental Tests (2012, methodology): “There is a vast literature on decoherence, including the experiments and models by (Brune et al., 1996; Gerlich et al., 2007; Harris and Stodolsky, 1981), books by (Breuer and Petruccione, 2000; Joos et al., 2003; Schlosshauer, 2007) and the seminal papers (Caldeira and Leggett, 1981; Joos and Zeh,…”