point mass freefall position time function

In this paper, we present a near-field interference scheme for 10 6 AMU particles. Although this is still far above the ground state of a typical 100-kHz trap, we will argue that high-mass interference can be realized experimentally with motional temperatures already achieved by optical cooling. Cavity cooling of particles of similar size was proposed 22 and recently achieved 23, 24 in one dimension, with temperatures in the milli-Kelvin range. Quite recently, optical feedback cooling has been demonstrated for 100-nm-sized particles 17, 18, based on pioneering work that demonstrated the trapping of polystyrene and glass microspheres 19, trapping of viruses and bacteria 20 and even of complete cells 21 in solutions and high vacuum. The realization of a proposed double-slit scheme with silica nanospheres 14 requires motional ground-state cooling, which is an equally challenging task. A first demonstration with molecular clusters 15 is still far away from the mentioned high-mass regime due to difficult experimental challenges, mainly concerning the source and detection. Recent proposals put forward nanoparticle interferometry 14, 15 in the mass range of 10 6–10 9 AMU to surpass the mass records currently held by molecule diffraction experiments 3, 16, while maintaining spatial separations large enough to be resolved by optical means. Macroscopic path separations are nowadays routinely achieved in atom interferometry 5, 6, 7, and technological advances in the control of opto-mechanical systems 8 promise that much more massive objects may be delocalized 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, albeit with spatial separations smaller than a single atom. Matter-wave interference with particles of increasing size and mass is a natural and viable method for testing the validity of the quantum superposition principle at unprecedented macroscopic scales 1, 2, 3, 4.

Point mass freefall position time function