Science Daily September 29, 2022
An international team of researchers (Austria, Germany) shaped a laser pulse with a spatial light modulator which interacted with a counter-propagating, synchronized pulsed electron beam in a modified scanning electron microscope. This enabled imprinting on demand transverse phase shifts to the electron wave, enabling unprecedented control over electron beams. They demonstrated the potential of this innovative technology by creating convex and concave electron lenses and by generating complex electron intensity distributions. According to the researchers their experiments paved the way for wavefront shaping in pulsed electron microscopes with thousands of programmable pixels. In contrast to other competing electron-shaping technologies, their scheme is programmable, and avoids losses, inelastic scattering, and instabilities due to the degradation of material diffraction elements, enables aberration correction and adaptive imaging in pulsed electron microscopes. It can be used to adjust the microscope to the specimens under study to maximize sensitivity…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Experimental setup: programmable ponderomotive deflection of electrons in free space…Credit: Phys. Rev. X 12, 031043, 26 September 2022Â