Anomalous diffraction of matter waves with minimal quantum metasurfaces

Abstract

In the last few years, there is a huge upsurge in the number of closed deals regarding quantum technologies for materials, computing, communication and instrumentation. Such a trend has inevitably affected the research funding market; thus, large state initiatives are taken that are directly expected to drive the formulation of novel research concepts and the development of quantum device prototypes from sensors and circuitry to quantum memory and repeaters. A fundamental operation behind all these applications is the effective steering of electrons, constituting matter waves, along specific directions and with certain magnitudes, due to development of various reflective and refractive orders. The objective of this study is to optimize the simplest structure that supports such anomalous diffraction, namely a quantum metasurface comprising cylindrical rods embedded in suitable crystalline matter. Several highly-performing designs from these minimal setups are proven to work exceptionally as multiport components, employable to a variety of quantum engineering implementations.