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Description
If a sufficiently slow beam of particles is incident upon a curved surface with a small grazing angle, so called whispering gallery states (WGS) will form. The WGS are quasi-stable quantum states, arising from the effect of the centrifugal force and mirror surface potentials experienced by the particles. Interference patterns generated by WGS have already been measured with cold neutrons at the Institute Laue-Langevin. Measurements with neutrons and other species of neutral particles can be used as a very sensitive tool to set constrains on short range surface interactions. They can furthermore be applied to measure shifts caused by external interactions, which can be used to measure the gravitational constant for matter and antimatter alike. We report on the design and construction of a WGS-spectrometer at the Marietta Blau Institute (MBI) in Vienna. Using a cold hydrogen beam and a silica mirror, this measurement will not only be a demonstration of multiple quantum reflections of atoms from a Casimir-Polder surface potential, but will also pave the road for future precision measurements, using WGS to constrain short range surface interactions on atomic hydrogen.