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

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.

References in corpus (3)

• Experimental Quantum State Tomography of Optical Fields and Ultrafast Statistical Sampling
• Spatio-temporal isolation of attosecond soft X-ray pulses in the water window
• High-temporal-resolution electron microscopy for imaging ultrafast electron dynamics

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• Electron Beam Aberration Correction Using Optical Near Fields
• Attomicroscopy: from Femtosecond to Attosecond Electron Microscopy
• High brightness ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscope based on a laser-driven cold-field emission source: principle and applications
• Structural dynamics probed by high-coherence electron pulses
• Controlling light emission with electron wave interference
• Beyond Fermi's Golden Rule in Free-Electron Quantum Electrodynamics: Acceleration/Radiation Correspondence