Reflection of hydrogen atoms from the surface of superfluid helium

Abstract

We propose a new method for studying the reflection of a hydrogen atom from a superfluid-helium film. Starting from the narrow width of the reflected angular distribution recently found experimentally, we tentatively extrapolate to the extreme limit of low ripplon wave numbers in which the adiabatic or degenerate-internal-states approximation becomes valid. We obtain simple closed expressions for single- and multiple-ripplon processes, which do not require the integration of a Schrödinger equation for their evaluation and do not depend on the specific form of the potential.