Quenching of antihydrogen gravitational states by surface charges

TL;DR

This paper investigates how surface charges affect antihydrogen's gravitational quantum states, revealing a quenching mechanism that reduces quantum reflection and involves atom-charge interactions and nonadiabatic transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a general approach to model quenching of antihydrogen gravitational states caused by localized surface charges, applicable to various short-range interactions.

Findings

Surface charges significantly reduce quantum reflection probabilities.

The quenching mechanism involves atom-charge interactions and nonadiabatic transitions.

The approach is versatile for different types of short-range interactions.

Abstract

We study an effect of quenching of antihydrogen quantum states near material surface in the gravitational field of the Earth by local charges randomly distributed along the mirror surface. The quenching mechanism reduces the quantum reflection probability because of additional atom-charge interaction and nonadiabatic transitions to excited gravitational states. Our approach is suitable for accounting for quenching caused by any kind of additional interaction with the characteristic range much smaller than the typical gravitational state wave-length.