Attosecond Electron Microscopy

Abstract

The electron motion in atoms and molecules is at the heart of all phenomena in nature that occur outside the nucleus. Recently, ultrafast electron and X-ray imaging tools have been developed to image the ultrafast dynamics of matter in real time and space. The cutting-edge temporal resolution of these imaging tools is on the order of a few tens to a hundred femtoseconds, limiting imaging to atomic dynamics. Hence electron motion imaging remains beyond the reach. Here, we achieved attosecond electron imaging temporal resolution in a transmission electron microscope, orders of magnitude faster than the highest reported imaging resolution, to demonstrate, which we coin it as (attomicroscopy) to image the field-induced electron dynamics in neutral multilayer graphene. Our results show that the electron motion between the carbon atoms in graphene is due to the field-driven electron dynamics in the conduction band and depends on the field waveform, strength, and polarization direction. This attomicroscopy imaging provides more insights into the electron motion of neutral matter in real time and space and would have long-anticipated real-life attosecond science applications in quantum physics, chemistry, and biology.

References in corpus (23)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Universal Dynamic Conductivity and Quantized Visible Opacity of Suspended Graphene
• Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg interferometry
• Tunable Isolated Attosecond X-ray Pulses with Gigawatt Peak Power from a Free-Electron Laser
• Light-field driven currents in graphene
• Attosecond Electron Pulse Trains and Quantum State Reconstruction in Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy
• Compression of sub-relativistic space-charge-dominated electron bunches for single-shot femtosecond electron diffraction
• Ultrafast Generation and Control of an Electron Vortex Beam via Chiral Plasmonic Near Fields
• Imaging electronic quantum motion with light
• Coherent and incoherent electron-phonon coupling in graphite observed with radio-frequency compressed ultrafast electron diffraction
• High-temporal-resolution electron microscopy for imaging ultrafast electron dynamics
• Optical gating and streaking of free-electrons with attosecond precision
• Attosecond electron microscopy by free-electron homodyne detection
• Solving the Jitter Problem in Microwave Compressed Ultrafast Electron Diffraction Instruments: Robust Sub-50 fs Cavity-Laser Phase Stabilization
• Monitoring Nonadiabatic Avoided Crossing Dynamics in Molecules by Ultrafast X-Ray Diffraction
• Proposed imaging of the ultrafast electronic motion in samples using x-ray phase-contrast
• Probing Electronic Fluxes via Time-Resolved X-ray Scattering
• Attomicroscopy: from Femtosecond to Attosecond Electron Microscopy
• Attosecond light field synthesis for electron motion control
• Theory of time-resolved non-resonant x-ray scattering for imaging ultrafast coherent electron motion
• Role of electron-electron interference in ultrafast time-resolved imaging of electronic wavepackets
• Imaging charge-migration in chiral molecules using time-resolved x-ray diffraction
• Time-resolved ultrafast x-ray scattering from an incoherent electronic mixture

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Light-induced quantum tunnelling current in graphene
• Time-domain study of coupled collective excitations in quantum materials
• Imaging Nanoscale Carrier, Thermal, and Structural Dynamics with Time-Resolved and Ultrafast Electron Energy-Loss Spectroscopy
• Photo-induced charge, spin, and orbital order in the two-orbital extended Hubbard model
• Mode-Dependent Phonon Relaxation in fcc Ni: Insights from Molecular Dynamics Simulations with Frozen-Trajectory Excitations