Abstract
We report the first demonstration of a Talbot interferometer for electrons. The interferometer was used to image the Talbot carpet behind a nano-fabricated material grating. The Talbot interferometer design uses two identical gratings, and is particularly sensitive to distortions of the incident wavefronts. To illustrate this we used our interferometer to measure the curvature of concave wavefronts in a weakly focused electron beam. We describe how this wavefront curvature demagnified the Talbot revivals, and we discuss further applications for electron Talbot interferometers.
Highlights
The Talbot effect [1], in which a wave imprinted with transverse periodicity reconstructs itself at regular intervals, is a diffraction phenomenon that occurs in many physical systems
In transmission electron microscopy Talbot revivals (Fourier self-images) behind crystals have been imaged directly, and understanding these revivals is necessary for the correct interpretation of crystal strucuture [5]
Nanogratings have been used recently to construct other types of electron interferometers - a Lau type [6] and a Mach-Zehnder type [7] - but both of these designs are insensitive to wavefront deformations in the incident electron beam
Summary
These data were obtained by scanning the position of analyzing grating G2 throughout the near-field region of G1, in both the x and z directions, while recording the total transmitted electron intensity. Analogous to X-ray and optical Talbot interferometers, this arrangement is very sensitive to deformations in the wavefronts of incoming electrons We demonstrated this by measuring the 2.1-meter radius of wavefront curvature of a focused electron beam, and creating demagnified Talbot revivals with features smaller than the original grating. Both the imaging and lithographic capabilities afforded by the scaled Talbot effect will be explored in future work
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