Talk:Atomic mirror

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Dear author of this article. I added a few lines about "atomic mirrors" based on diffraction of the incoming beams on a properly shaped surface. I also deleted the line where it said that "atomic mirrors are not robust up to present" since this statement was not correct. Wolframs 16:50, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] My quick interpretation

From the (admittedly, small amount of) literature I have read, it seems that the atom mirror is in fact used just as mirrors are used with light and photons. In the case of photons, thanks to the principles of quantum electrodynamics and Feynman's path integral formulation, the photons hit atoms on the mirror's surface and have some probability of being reflected to roughly the same location as the photon's source, so you can view photochemical reactions as this cascading photon emission/absorption process. And so, with atoms, you can't really have smooth mirrors of that sort because we're talking about much, much bigger wavelengths here. So, what we have to do, according to some Shimizu USPTO patents, is make a surface that has striations of maybe ~10 nm in width at at least ten times further apart from each other, making an "atom mirror". It is very likely that this interpretation is off somewhat, hopefully some physicist will come along and help me out. Hope this one day makes it to the article. -- kanzure 01:48, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Kanzure, the problem is not just wavelength. The problem is the van der Waals attraction (Casimir effect).. Do you think it worth, to estimate the reflectivity of a structure of a set of posts, in the similar manner as the refelctivity of a set of ridges is estimated?dima 06:04, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

I do not know how to answer your question, Domitori, because it would take some very large molecular system or something, maybe one of those ultracold molecules used in Bose-Einstein Condensation in order to test the question of posts that are separated by comparably large orders of magnitude of distance, rather than the distances played with in the Casmir effect. Wait, what are you talking about? kanzure 18:49, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] subject of Low importance???

I upset with the qualification Low importance. I rewrote the article. Does it look better now? Should we add more pics of different atomic mirrors?dima 09:28, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Don't take it personally. These importance rankings are relative to the stated field. Within physics as a whole, atomic mirrors are of low importance. Examples of subjects of high importance are quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, and the theory of Relativity. Classification of this subject as "low importance" within physics is not a judgement on the quality of the article at all—it's a judgement of the role this subject plays within its field.--Srleffler 03:41, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed move

I have put a speedy deletion tag on Atomic mirror, so that this article can be moved there. There was no justification for using a disambiguation page or the qualifier "(physics)" here. The organization Atomic Mirror is distinguished by the fact that it is capitalized (as a proper name). The dablinks at the top of each article take care of disambiguation.--Srleffler 03:44, 16 October 2007 (UTC)