Attomicroscopy: from Femtosecond to Attosecond Electron Microscopy

Abstract

In the last decade, the development of Ultrafast Electron Diffraction (UED) and Microscopy (UEM) has enabled the imaging of atomic motion in real time and space. These pivotal table-top tools opened the door for a vast range of applications in different areas of science spanning chemistry, physics, materials science, and biology. We first discuss the basic principles and recent advancements, including some of the important applications, of both UED and UEM. Then, we discuss the recent advances in the field that have enhanced the spatial and temporal resolutions, where the latter, however, is still limited to a few hundreds of femtoseconds, preventing the imaging of ultrafast dynamics of matter on the scale of several tens of femtoseconds. Then, we present our new optical gating approach for generating an isolated 30 fs electron pulse with sufficient intensity to attain a temporal resolution on the same time scale. This achievement allows, for the first time, imaging the electron dynamics of matter. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the optical gating approach to generate an isolated attosecond electron pulse, utilizing our recently demonstrated optical attosecond laser pulse, which paves the way for establishing the field of Attomicroscopy, ultimately enabling us to image the electron motion in action.

arXiv comment57 pages, 23 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Attosecond electron microscopy by free-electron homodyne detection
• Nanoscale-femtosecond dielectric response of Mott insulators captured by two-colour near-field ultrafast electron microscopy
• Attosecond Electron Microscopy
• Non-Poissonian ultrashort, nanoscale electron pulses
• Four-Dimensional Emittance Measurements of Ultrafast Electron Diffraction Optics Corrected Up to Sextupole Order
• Quantum wavefunction reconstruction by free-electron spectral shearing interferometry
• Influence of Photoemission Geometry on Timing and Efficiency in 4D Ultrafast Electron Microscopy