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Applied Physics Letters

Interference Effects in Laser-Modulated Electron Beams

Robert William Schmieder

Published Jun 15, 1972• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A new class of electron interferometers is proposed that make use of a laser-modulated electron beam. The observable interference arises in second-order processes, since the first-order interference oscillates rapidly and averages to zero. It is shown that the detected signal varies sinusoidally with the separation of two sequential modulators, thus generating a fringe pattern with peak-to-peak spacing that may be smaller or larger than the laser wavelength. It is suggested that such devices could be used to detect and study the modulation process and, because they operate with massive charged particles, to perform a wide variety of new experiments and high-precision measurements.

DOI
10.1063/1.1654041

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New levels of control over the atomic motion have been attained through the development of the atom laser. The unique properties of these coherent atomic sources open up a wide range of new possibilities in the fields of atom optics and precision measurement. In this article we have discussed the high contrast interference pattern obtained from an atom laser with two output modes of different energies. It should be possible to create a highly complex interference pattern in the output beam of an atom laser by applying a correspondingly tailored radio wave field for output coupling. A novel atom optical manipulation method allowed us to reflect, recapture and focus an atom laser beam. Due to its simplicity and precision the technique is ideally suited for creating an interferometer for the atom laser beam. It seems feasible to split the atom laser beam into two components and recombine it after delaying one of the two components. The resulting interference pattern would reveal the coherence properties of the atom laser beam.
We discuss the concept of an all-optical and ionizing matter-wave interferometer in the time domain. The proposed setup aims at testing the wave nature of highly massive clusters and molecules, and it will enable new precision experiments with a broad class of atoms, using the same laser system. The propagating particles are illuminated by three pulses of a standing ultraviolet laser beam, which detaches an electron via efficient single-photon absorption. Optical gratings may have periods as small as 80 nm, leading to wide diffraction angles for cold atoms and to compact setups even for very massive clusters. Accounting for the coherent and the incoherent parts of the particle–light interaction, we show that the combined effect of phase and amplitude modulation of the matter waves gives rise to a Talbot–Lau-like interference effect with a characteristic dependence on the pulse delay time.
Very much like the ubiquitous quantum interference of a single particle with itself, quantum interference of two independent, but indistinguishable, particles is also possible. This interference is a direct result of quantum exchange statistics, however, it is observed only in the joint probability to find the particles in two separated detectors. Here we report the first observation of such interference fringes between two independent and non-interacting electrons in an interferometer proposed by Yurke et al. and Samuelsson et al. Our experiment resembles the "Hanbury Brown and Twiss" (HBT) experiment, which was performed with classical waves. In the experiment, two independent and mutually incoherent electron beams were each partitioned into two trajectories. The combined four trajectories enclosed an Aharonov-Bohm (AB) flux (but not the two trajectories of a single electron). While individual currents were found to be independent of the AB flux, as expected, the cross-correlation between current fluctuations in two opposite points across the device exhibited strong AB oscillations. This is a direct signature of orbital entanglement between two electrons even though they never interact with each other.
Conditional interference fringes are found when parametric down-converted photon pairs are sent to two Young's double slits. The transmitted photon pairs are detected in coincidence as a function of the transverse spatial coordinates. Conditional interference is found in the fourth-order interference pattern with and without second-order interference. A quantum multimode calculation shows that the fourth-order Young interference pattern is strongly dependent on the transverse profile of the pump laser that generates the twin photon pairs. Conditionality is observed by tailoring this profile. A control of the conditionality is obtained via the pump laser beam transverse profile.
Interference fringes produced by the superposition of light beams from two independent lasers have been investigated under conditions where the light flux was so low that one photon was usually received at the detector before the next one was emitted by one or the other source. Because the average number of photons detected in each observation was only about 10, a photon correlation technique was used to demonstrate the presence of interference fringes. The measurement procedure was automated, and this led to much greater statistical accuracy than was previously reported. The effect of varying the observation time and the number of interference fringes sampled was investigated, and found to be in good agreement with theory.