Attomicroscopy: from Femtosecond to Attosecond Electron Microscopy

TL;DR

This paper reviews ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy, highlights recent resolution limits, and introduces novel optical gating techniques to generate femtosecond and attosecond electron pulses for real-time atomic and electron motion imaging.

Contribution

It presents a new optical gating method to produce 30 fs and attosecond electron pulses, enabling direct imaging of ultrafast electron dynamics.

Findings

Achieved 30 fs electron pulse generation with optical gating.

Demonstrated feasibility of attosecond electron pulses.

Enabled imaging of electron motion in matter.

Abstract

In the last decade, the development of Ultrafast Electron Diffraction (UED) and Microscopy (UEM) has enabled the imaging of atomic motion in real time and space. These pivotal table-top tools opened the door for a vast range of applications in different areas of science spanning chemistry, physics, materials science, and biology. We first discuss the basic principles and recent advancements, including some of the important applications, of both UED and UEM. Then, we discuss the recent advances in the field that have enhanced the spatial and temporal resolutions, where the latter, however, is still limited to a few hundreds of femtoseconds, preventing the imaging of ultrafast dynamics of matter on the scale of several tens of femtoseconds. Then, we present our new optical gating approach for generating an isolated 30 fs electron pulse with sufficient intensity to attain a temporal resolution on the same time scale. This achievement allows, for the first time, imaging the electron dynamics of matter. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the optical gating approach to generate an isolated attosecond electron pulse, utilizing our recently demonstrated optical attosecond laser pulse, which paves the way for establishing the field of Attomicroscopy, ultimately enabling us to image the electron motion in action.