Quantum manifestations of chaos in elastic atom-surface scattering -: art. no. 235401

Quantum manifestations of chaos in the diffraction of atoms from corrugated surfaces, for a range of initial conditions easily attainable in scattering experiments, are presented and discussed. The appearance of strong oscillations in diffraction patterns is shown to be directly related to the presence of classical chaos and threshold effects. We also show that the autocorrelation function for some of the collision S-matrix elements over incident angles is sensitive to the character, hyperbolic or nonhyperbolic, of the underlying chaotic dynamics, in agreement with general semiclassical arguments for unbound chaotic systems.