Experimental determination of the neutron channeling length in a planar waveguide

In neutron waveguides, the neutron wave is confined inside the guiding layer of the structure and can escape from the layer edge as a microbeam. The channeling within the guiding layer is accompanied by an exponential decay of the neutron wave function density inside the waveguide. Here, we report direct determination of the corresponding decay constant, termed the neutron channeling length. For this, we measured the microbeam intensity as a function of the length of a neutron absorbing layer of variable length placed onto the surface of a waveguide structure. Such planar neutron waveguides transform a conventional neutron beam into an extremely narrow but slightly divergent microbeam, which can be used for the investigation of nanostructures with submicron spatial resolution.