Photo ionization of an atom passed through a diffraction grating

TL;DR

This paper investigates how passing an atom through a diffraction grating affects its photo ionization, revealing interference effects and differences in particle momentum distributions, with implications for information decoding from spectra.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of photo ionization in multi-site atomic states created by diffraction gratings, highlighting unique interference phenomena and information encoding in spectra.

Findings

Electron and ion spectra show clear interference effects.

Momentum distributions of particles differ and do not mirror each other.

Recoil ion spectra fully encode the diffraction grating information.

Abstract

We consider photo ionization of an atom which, due to passing through a diffraction grating, is prepared in a multi-site state possessing a periodic space structure with alternating maxima and minima. It has been found that this process qualitatively differs from photo ionization of a 'normal' atom. In particular, the spectra of emitted electrons and recoil ions in this process display clear one- and two-particle interference effects. Moreover, there are also striking differences between the momentum distributions of these particles, which no longer mirror each other. The origin of all these features is discussed in detail. It is also shown that the information about the diffraction grating, which is encoded in the multi-site state of the atom, can be fully decoded by exploring the spectra of recoil ions whereas the photo-electron spectra contain this information only partially.