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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Spontaneous emission from a wide quantum electron

Aviv Karnieli, Roei Remez, Sivan Trajtenberg‐Mills, Niv Shapira, Ido E. Kaminer, Yossi Lereah, Ady Arie

Published Jan 1, 2019• 0 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1364/cleo_qels.2019.fth4m.7

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We investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, the interpretation of the free-electron wave function using spontaneous emission. We use a transversely wide single-electron wave function to describe the spatial extent of transverse coherence of an electron beam in a standard transmission electron microscope. When the electron beam passes next to a metallic grating, spontaneous Smith-Purcell radiation is emitted. We then examine the effect of the electron wave function transversal size on the emitted radiation. Two interpretations widely used in the literature are considered: (1) radiation by a continuous current density attributed to the quantum probability current, equivalent to the spreading of the electron charge continuously over space; and (2) interpreting the square modulus of the wave function as a probability distribution of finding a point particle at a certain location, wherein the electron charge is always localized in space. We discuss how these two interpretations give contradictory predictions for the radiation pattern in our experiment, comparing the emission from narrow and wide wave functions with respect to the emitted radiation's wavelength. Matching our experiment with a new quantum-electrodynamics derivation, we conclude that the measurements can be explained by the probability distribution approach wherein the electron interacts with the grating as a classical point charge. Our findings clarify the transition between the classical and quantum regimes and shed light on the mechanisms that take part in general light-matter interactions.
Electrons in atoms and molecules are versatile physical systems allowing a vast range of light–matter interactions. Spontaneous emission, which appears in a wide variety of applications, depends crucially on the bound electron energy levels. The discrete nature of these electron energy levels and the ionization threshold constrain the energy scale of all light–matter interactions involving bound electrons. To bypass these constraints, we take ideas from optical and electronic beam shaping and propose creating new electron states as superpositions of extended states above the ionization threshold. We show that such superpositions enable the control of spontaneous emission with tunable spectra in the eV–keV range. We find that the specific shaping lengthens the diffraction and radiative lifetimes of the wavepackets in exchange for increasing their spatial spreads. Our approach could have applications toward developing novel kinds of light emitters at hard-to-access spectral ranges.