Johannes Fiedler presented NanoLace at ACES Workshop, 20-21 October 2022

Title: Reconstruction of matter-wave diffraction experiments – A potential concept for sensing and lithography applications

Abstract:

The diffraction of matter waves is an established experiment that verifies the wave-particle duality. This fundamental principle relates the corresponding matter wave’s wavelength to the particle’s momentum leading to sub-nanometre wavelengths typically. In contrast to standard interferometers with light, matter-wave interferometers provide the potential for much higher resolutions by simultaneously dramatical decreasing the amount of transferred energy. To this end, matter-wave diffraction has a wide range of potential applications, such as lithography [1], inelastic surface scattering [2], or quantum sensing of physical properties [3]. Beyond the drastic reduction of the wavelength, matter waves typically carry more information about the physical objects and the conditions they are prepared in due to the matter-matter interactions leading to a more complex wave structure that needs to be reconstructed to extract the wanted information.

In this presentation, we will introduce the involved matter-matter interactions that need to be considered in matter-wave diffraction experiments and demonstrate their impact on interference patterns. We will discuss the difficulties concerning their reconstruction with standard methods developed for light interference and provide an alternative approach via machine learning. We successfully applied this method to estimate masks for matter-wave lithography [4], which will be demonstrated.

[1] Nesse, T., Simonsen, I., Holst, B.: Nanometer-resolution mask lithography with matter waves: Near-field binary holography. Phys. Rev. Applied 11, 024009 (2019).

[2] Holst, B. et al.: Material properties particularly suited to be measured with helium atom scattering. Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 23, 7653-7672 (2021).

[3] Fiedler, J., Broer, W., Scheel, S.: Reconstruction of Casimir-Polder interactions from matter-wave interference experiments. Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics 50(15), 155501 (2017).

[4] Fiedler, J., Palau, A.S., Osestad, E.K., Parviainen, P., Holst, B.: Realistic mask generation for matter-wave lithography via machine learning. In preparation.