Researchers observe atomic-scale "rainbow scattering" in graphene for the first time

Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen and Uppsala University, led by Carolin Frank together with Prof. Marika Schleberger and Prof. Daniel Primetzhofer, have experimentally observed rainbow scattering in ion transmission through single-layer graphene, a phenomenon that had previously only been predicted and simulated, never directly measured.

Rainbow scattering is a well-known effect in classical scattering theory, arising when particles following different trajectories converge onto the same characteristic angle. It appears in contexts ranging from ordinary rainbows to nuclear and crystal scattering, and it encodes detailed information about the interaction potential between a projectile and its target. Applying this to graphene had been an attractive but elusive target: capturing the effect requires both an extremely clean, defect-free single-layer graphene sample and a detector with very high angular resolution, since even minor surface contamination smears out the pattern.

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