Young’s Two-Slit Experiment with Electrons

Mark P. Silverman

Amir Hossein Tavabi, Chris Boothroyd, Emrah Yücelen +4 more

The key features of quantum mechanics are vividly illustrated by the Young-Feynman two-slit thought experiment, whose second part discusses the recording of an electron distribution with one of the two slits partially or totally closed by an aperture. Here, we realize the original Feynman proposal in a modern electron microscope equipped with a high brightness gun and two biprisms, with one of the biprisms used as a mask. By exciting the microscope lenses to conjugate the biprism plane with the slit plane, observations are carried out in the Fraunhofer plane with nearly ideal control of the covering of one of the slits. A second, new experiment is also presented, in which interference phenomena due to partial overlap of the slits are observed in the image plane. This condition is obtained by inserting the second biprism between the two slits and the first biprism and by biasing it in order to overlap their images.

Paul Peter Urone, Roger A. Hinrichs

Stefano Frabboni, G. C. Gazzadi, G. Pozzi

In this short Note we report a method for producing samples containing two nano-sized slits suitable for demonstrating to undergraduate and graduate students the double-slit electron interference experiment in a conventional transmission electron microscope.

Chu-Shik Kang, B. C. Yap

J.-Y. Chesnel, Anas Hajaji, R O Barrachina +1 more

Evidence is given for Young-type interferences caused by a single electron acting on a given double-center scatterer analogous to an atomic-size double-slit system. The electron is provided by autoionization of a doubly excited He atom following the capture of the electrons of H2 by a He2+ incoming ion. The autoionizing projectile is a single-electron source, independent of the interferometer provided by the two H+ centers of the fully ionized H2 molecule. This experiment resembles the famous thought experiment imagined by Feynman in 1963, in which the quantum nature of the electron is illustrated from a Young-like double-slit experiment. Well-defined oscillations are visible in the angular distribution of the scattered electrons, showing that each electron interferes with itself.