Abstract
Temporally shaping the density of electron beams using light forms the basis for a wide range of established and emerging technologies, including free-electron lasers and attosecond electron microscopy. The modulation depth of compressed electron pulses is a key figure of merit limiting applications. In this work, we present an approach for generating background-free attosecond electron pulse trains by sequential inelastic electron-light scattering. Harnessing quantum interference in the fractional Talbot effect, we suppress unwanted background density in electron compression by several orders of magnitude. Our results will greatly enhance applications of coherent electron-light scattering, such as stimulated cathodoluminescence and streaking.Received 19 March 2021Accepted 7 June 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.L032036Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasQuantum coherence & coherence measuresQuantum controlQuantum-to-classical transitionUltrafast phenomenaPhysical SystemsRadiation from moving chargesAccelerators & BeamsGeneral PhysicsParticles & FieldsCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics
Highlights
Main compression stageTemporal focusing by monochromatic light is imperfect since paraxial trajectories do not converge into one point in the space-time diagram, affecting the electron pulse duration
A key limitation for these efforts is the quality of compression and the amount of uncompressed background density [34,36,37,46,49], sometimes described by the classical multielectron bunching factor for self-amplified spontaneous emission based free-electron lasers [50,51,52,53]
Even for a pure single-electron state [54,55,56] focused in the quantum regime [34], limited coherence arises [40,42,43,44,47]
Summary
Temporal focusing by monochromatic light is imperfect since paraxial trajectories do not converge into one point in the space-time diagram, affecting the electron pulse duration. Another type of temporal aberration stems from repelling fixed points, at which half of the electrons are steered to a nearly homogeneous background in density [Fig. 2(a)]. The latter does not improve with increasing g because it depends only on the product gz [see Eq (6)], and phase-squeezed light does not reduce the background [65].
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