title: Return to coherence via Debye-Waller factor quenching.
abstract: A number of scattering situations can naively be expected to show essentially classical features, because of a (generalized) Debye-Waller factor causing decoherence and destroying interference and diffraction phenomena. It is shown, however, that such decoherence may be quenched in several ways: A-the momentum transfer to a large system may be separated into subtransfers to individual atoms, each subtransfer being too small to cause a strong Debye-Waller effect; B-(more significantly) the high-frequency vibrations may be ineffective in causing strong decoherence, because the corresponding correlation functions remain non-vanishing for too short a time. When this Debye-Waller factor quenching takes place, coherence is restored and typical quantum wave-like phenomena reappear.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Fisica, CNISM and Università di Genova, Via Dodecaneso 33, I-16146 Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Andrea C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Levi