Direct evidence of a continuous transition between waves and particles
Quantum Physics
2022-09-27 v1 Materials Science
Abstract
The correlation between particle and wave descriptions of electron-matter interactions is analyzed by measuring the delocalization of an evanescent field using electron microscopy. Its spatial extension coincides with the energy-dependent, self-coherence length of propagating wave packets that obey the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation and undergo a Goos-H\"anchen shift. In the Heisenberg limit they are created by self-interferences during coherent-inelastic Coulomb interactions with a decoherence phase {\Delta}{\phi} = 0.5 rad and shrink to particle-like dimensions for energy losses of more than 1000 eV.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2209.11846,
title = {Direct evidence of a continuous transition between waves and particles},
author = {Christian Kisielowski and Petra Specht and Stig Helveg and Fu-Rong Chen and Bert Freitag and Joerg Jinschek and Dirk Van Dyck},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.11846},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
22 pages, 7 figures, submitted to PRB