Arndt, Markus

In 2023 we will be celebrating the centenary of Louis de Broglie’s idea¹ that all moving matter has to be treated as ‘in phase with a wave’. His idea was soon confirmed in diffraction experiments with electrons, atoms and even diatomic molecules, but it took more than 75 years until the quantum nature of the center of mass motion was observed for complex hot molecules². Since then we have been able to demonstrate the matter-wave nature of atoms, vitamins, molecular clusters³, polypeptides⁴, and organic molecules even beyond a mass of 25 kDa ⁵ – in good agreement with the predictions by non-relativistic quantum mechanics. With increasing mass and complexity, the challenges are however continuously also increasing: it requires novel beam sources, coherent wave-front dividers for bound many-body systems in free flight as well as efficient interferometer and detection schemes. I will discuss the development of novel ideas and tools, based on single photon ionization and photocleavage to control and probe the quantum wave nature of large biomolecules and metal clusters.⁶

References
[1] L. De Broglie, "Waves and Quanta", Nature 112, 540-540 (1923)
[2] M. Arndt, et al., "Wave-particle duality of C60 molecules", Nature 401, 680-682 (1999)
[3] P. Haslinger, et al., "A universal matter-wave interferometer with optical ionization gratings",Nature Phys. 9, 144 (2013)
[4] A. Shayeghi, et al., "Matter-wave interference of a native polypeptide", Nat. Communs. 11, 1447 (2020)
[5] Y.Y. Fein, et al., "Quantum superposition of molecules beyond 25 kDa", Nature Physics 15, 1242–1245 (2019)
[6] F. Kiałka, et al., "A roadmap for universal high-mass matter-wave interferometry", AVS Quant.Science 4, 020502 (2022)