Summary: The exact solution to the problem of reflection and diffraction of atomic de Broglie waves by a travelling evanescent wave is found starting with a bare-state formulation. The solution for the wavefunctions, the tunnelling losses and the non-adiabatic losses are given exactly in terms of hyper-Bessel functions, and are valid for all detuning and Rabi frequencies, thus generalizing previous approximate methods. Furthermore, we give the limiting cases of the amplitudes in the uniform semiclassical limit, which is valid in all regions including near the classical turning points, and in the large and weak coupling cases. Exact results for the zero detuning case are obtained in terms of Bessel functions. We find our uniform semiclassical limit to be closer to the exact result over the full range of parameter values than the previously reported calculations.