Indirect evidence for the Gouy phase for matter waves

Abstract

We show that the well known geometric phase, the Gouy phase in optics can be defined for matter waves in vacuum as well. In particular we show that the underlying physics for the "matter waves" Gouy phase is the generalized Schroedinger-Robertson uncertainty principle, more specifically, the off diagonal elements of the covariance matrix. Recent experiments involving the diffraction of fullerene molecules and the uncertainty principle are shown to be quantitatively consistent with the existence of a Gouy phase for matter waves.