Mirror, atomic electromagnetic

An individual axisymmetric photon wavepacket that propagates in vacuo and meets a mirror surface, should be reflected in the same way as a plane wave, on account of the matching of the electromagnetic field components at the surface. Inside a material with a refraction index greater than that in vacuo, the transmission of the wavepacket is affected by interaction with atoms and molecules, in a way that is outside the scope of the discussion here. 

The atom mirror is the key element of matter-wave optics. An electromagnetic mirror for neutral atoms was suggested by Cook and Hill (1982). The idea was to use the radiation force of an evanescent laser wave outside a dielectric surface to repel slow atoms. This evanescent-wave atomic mirror was realized experimentally by Balykin et al. (1988a). 

Surface plasmon waves are surface electromagnetic modes that travel along a metal-dielectric interface as bound nonradiative waves with their field amplitude decaying exponentially perpendicular to the interface (Raether 1988). Surface plasmons are usually excited by coupling them to an evanescent wave at a dielectric surface. A plasmon wave atom mirror can be formed on a glass surface with a thin deposited... 

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