2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Wave-Particle Duality of Neutrons, Atoms, and Molecules

The practice of deBroglie matter-wave interference has seen great advances during the past few years. The advent of Bose-Einstein condensation in 1995 led to the development of coherent atomic beams of unprecedented brightness, which have found numerous applications in precision measurement, sensing, and improved determination of the values of fundamental constants. A new generation of interferometers has been developed that use light waves as gratings for matter waves; these are able to show quantum diffraction of complex molecules that contain hundreds of atoms. It is now possible to imagine subjecting a small virus to the equivalent of a two-slit diffraction experiment to see whether the reconstructed virus exhibits biological functionality. Quantum diffraction of large molecules provides an experimental path to the borderlands of classical and quantum physics, where one can explore the limits of wave-particle duality, the superposition principle, and quantum entanglement. Neutron interferometry offers uniquely sensitive tests of the effect of gravity on quantum particles, recently identified opportunities for dark-matter searches, and application to the characterization of magnetic materials. This symposium brings together researchers from different scientific domains to present a coherent picture of matter-wave interference today.