Atomic diffraction by light gratings with very short wavelengths

Abstract

Lasers with wavelengths of the order of the atomic size are becoming available. We explore the behavior of light-matter interactions in this emergent field by considering the atomic Kapitza-Dirac effect. We derive the diffraction patterns, which are in principle experimentally testable. From a fundamental point of view, our proposal provides an example of system where the periodicity of the diffraction grating is comparable to the size of the diffracted object.

References in corpus (3)

• Origin-independent calculation of quadrupole intensities in X-ray spectroscopy
• Study of quadrupole polarizabilities with combined configuration interaction and coupled-cluster method
• QED-based Optical Bloch Equations without electric dipole approximation: A model for a two-level atom interacting with a monochromatic X-ray laser beam