10:00 AM (CET) 14 October 2020. Inaugural Speaker Prof. Dr Markus  Arndt (Universität Wien)

​UNIVERSAL MATTER-WAVE INTERFEROMETRY: FROM ATOMS TO MASSIVE NANOPARTICLES 

When Louis de Broglie proposed his matter-wave hypothesis in 1923, it inspired Schrödinger’s wave mechanics and kick-started the development of modern quantum physics. The hypothesis was rapidly confirmed for electrons, neutrons, atoms and diatomic molecules, but it took nearly 70 years to develop a flourishing field of atom interferometry and again 10 more years for macromolecule interferometry to blossom. At the University of Vienna we now routinely observe and exploit the quantum wave nature of atoms, vitamins and neurotransmitters, polypeptides and antibiotics, molecular clusters or dendritic organic compounds.  We see matter waves for objects composed of thousands of atoms with masses beyond 25 000 amu - 7 orders of magnitude more massive than the electron.

What is now needed to take the same logarithmic step further and push matter-wave physics to masses beyond 1012 amu? What sources, manipulation and detection schemes will be needed?  Why should we care and what will we learn along the way? What can we hope to learn about the meaning of the wave function, what about the relation between quantum physics and space-time?   

This 45 min talk will be a teaser, to open a window to the rapidly growing field of complex matter-waves.