Levi AC. Return to coherence via Debye-Waller factor quenching.
JOURNAL OF PHYSICS. CONDENSED MATTER : AN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS JOURNAL 2009;
21:405004. [PMID:
21832406 DOI:
10.1088/0953-8984/21/40/405004]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Abstract
A number of scattering situations can naively be expected to show essentially classical features, because of a (generalized) Debye-Waller factor causing decoherence and destroying interference and diffraction phenomena. It is shown, however, that such decoherence may be quenched in several ways: A-the momentum transfer to a large system may be separated into subtransfers to individual atoms, each subtransfer being too small to cause a strong Debye-Waller effect; B-(more significantly) the high-frequency vibrations may be ineffective in causing strong decoherence, because the corresponding correlation functions remain non-vanishing for too short a time. When this Debye-Waller factor quenching takes place, coherence is restored and typical quantum wave-like phenomena reappear.
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