Shaping electron beams for the generation of innovative measurements in the (S)TEM

Abstract

In TEM, a typical goal consists of making a small electron probe in the sample plane in order to obtain high spatial resolution in scanning transmission electron microscopy. In order to do so, the phase of the electron wave is corrected to resemble a spherical wave compensating for aberrations in the magnetic lenses. In this contribution we discuss the advantage of changing the phase of an electron wave in a specific way in order to obtain fundamentally different electron probes opening up new application in the (S)TEM. We focus on electron vortex states as a specific family of waves with an azimuthal phase signature and discuss their properties, production and applications. The concepts presented here are rather general and also different classes of probes can be obtained in a similar fashion showing that electron probes can be tuned to optimise a specific measurement or interaction.

References in corpus (7)

• Semiclassical Dynamics of Electron Wave Packet States with Phase Vortices
• Electron vortex beams in a magnetic field: A new twist on Landau levels and Aharonov-Bohm states
• Atomic scale electron vortices for nanoresearch
• A new way of producing electron vortex probes for STEM
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• Topological analysis of paraxially scattered electron vortex beams
• On-column 2p bound state with topological charge \pm1 excited by an atomic-size vortex beam in an aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Imaging the dynamics of free-electron Landau states
• Holographic generation of highly twisted electron beams
• Interaction of electron beams with optical nanostructures and metamaterials: From coherent photon sources towards shaping the wave function
• Schroedinger electrons interacting with optical gratings: quantum mechanical study of the inverse Smith Purcell effect
• Generation and Application of Bessel Beams in Electron Microscopy