WAVE-OPTICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH VERY COLD NEUTRONS

A series of experiments is reviewed on precision measurements of the diffraction of slow neutrons paralleling those with light: diffraction at an absorbing edge, at an absorbing wire, and at single-and double-slit assemblies. Besides their educational value, the experimental results also provide precise confirmations of the theoretical predictions as calculated via a Fresnel-Kirchhoff approach. The intensity in all these experiments was so low that the formation of the interference patterns individual neutron by individual neutron could easily be observed. The experiments are presented and analyzed in a way suitable for undergraduate teaching.