Figure 4

Schematic of the novel near-field interferometry approach for MAQRO. The approach uses a cavity and a standing-wave grating. First a particle is trapped and its center-of-mass motion 3D-cooled using modes in the first cavity (left). The red dot indicates the particle position. Then the particle is released, and the wave-function expands for some time \(t_{1}\). After that time, the optical phase grating is applied for a short time (right). The expanded red region illustrates the expanded wave-function.