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Free keywords:
HELIUM-ATOMS; DIMER; WAVE
Abstract:
Diffraction of molecular beams of CH3F, CHF3, and metastable He* and Ne* from a 100-nm-period micro-fabricated transmission grating has been observed. Due to the finite velocity spread and the corresponding temporal coherence of the molecular beams, diffraction peaks of only the first few orders are resolved in total-intensity measurements, while higher order peaks are increasingly broadened and smeared-out. Combining time-of-flight (TOF) measurements with angular scans has allowed to observe TOF-resolved diffraction data which yield full resolution of all detected diffraction peaks. Here, this method has been applied to investigate atom/molecule-surface interactions. In general, it can be used to observe resolved diffraction patterns of a wide range of atomic and molecular beams whose broad velocity distributions prevent peak-resolution in conventional total-intensity measurements.
