Fiedler, Johannes — The role of dispersion forces in matter-wave scattering experiments

Dispersion forces, such as van der Waals forces between
neutral particles or Casimir-Polder forces between neutral particles and
dielectric surfaces, are caused by the ground-state fluctuations of the
electromagnetic field. They can be understood via an exchange of virtual
photons that are generated as a dipole response of the particle due to
the vacuum fluctuation of the field surrounding it. These resulting
forces are weak for large separations and dramatically increase with
decreasing distances. To this end, in matter-wave scattering
experiments, where the beam particles reach close distances to the
diffracted object, which is typical in the order of a few nanometers,
these forces dominate the interaction and have a large impact on the
experimental results. In this talk, we will shortly introduce these
forces and illustrate their impact on the diffraction of particle beams
from porous materials. This is of particular relevance for  metastable
atom lithography with binary holography masks, currently pursued in the
FET-Open project Nanolace.