The reflection of very cold neutrons from diamond powder nanoparticles

We study the possibility of efficiently reflecting very cold neutrons (VCN) from powders of nanoparticles. In particular, we measured the scattering of VCN on powders of diamond nanoparticles as a function of powder sample thickness, neutron velocity and scattering angle. We observed extremely intense scattering of VCN even off thin powder samples. This agrees qualitatively with the model of independent nanoparticles at rest. We show that this intense scattering would allow us to use nanoparticle powders very efficiently as the very first reflectors for neutrons with energies within a complete VCN range up to 10 - 4 eV .