English

Attosecond Electron Pulse Trains and Quantum State Reconstruction in Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy

Quantum Physics 2018-01-23 v1

Abstract

We introduce a framework for the preparation, coherent manipulation and characterization of free-electron quantum states, experimentally demonstrating attosecond pulse trains for electron microscopy. Specifically, we employ phase-locked single-color and two-color optical fields to coherently control the electron wave function along the beam direction. We establish a new variant of quantum state tomography - "SQUIRRELS" - to reconstruct the density matrices of free-electron ensembles and their attosecond temporal structure. The ability to tailor and quantitatively map electron quantum states will promote the nanoscale study of electron-matter entanglement and the development of new forms of ultrafast electron microscopy and spectroscopy down to the attosecond regime.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.03680,
  title  = {Attosecond Electron Pulse Trains and Quantum State Reconstruction in Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy},
  author = {Katharina E. Priebe and Christopher Rathje and Sergey V. Yalunin and Thorsten Hohage and Armin Feist and Sascha Schäfer and Claus Ropers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03680},
  year   = {2018}
}