Attosecond electron pulses for 4D diffraction and microscopy

In this contribution, we consider the advancement of ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy to cover the attosecond time domain. The concept is centered on the compression of femtosecond electron packets to trains of 15-attosecond pulses by the use of the ponderomotive force in synthesized gratings of optical fields. Such attosecond electron pulses are significantly shorter than those achievable with extreme UV light sources near 25 nm (≈50 eV) and have the potential for applications in the visualization of ultrafast electron dynamics, especially of atomic structures, clusters of atoms, and some materials.

[1]  T. Kibble,et al.  Mutual Refraction of Electrons and Photons , 1966 .

[2]  Ahmed H. Zewail,et al.  Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions in Cuprates Observed by Ultrafast Electron Crystallography , 2007, Science.

[3]  U. Heinzmann,et al.  Time-resolved atomic inner-shell spectroscopy , 2002, Nature.

[4]  Jianming Cao,et al.  Femtosecond electron diffraction for direct measurement of ultrafast atomic motions , 2003 .

[5]  G. Stupakov,et al.  Ponderomotive laser acceleration and focusing in vacuum for generation of attosecond electron bunches. , 2001, Physical review letters.

[6]  U. Heinzmann,et al.  Attosecond metrology , 2007, Nature.

[7]  J. P. Marangos,et al.  Probing Proton Dynamics in Molecules on an Attosecond Time Scale , 2006, Science.

[8]  A. Zewail,et al.  Ultrafast electron crystallography. 1. Nonequilibrium dynamics of nanometer-scale structures , 2007 .

[9]  Jonas Weissenrieder,et al.  Four-dimensional ultrafast electron microscopy of phase transitions , 2006, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[10]  V. Lobastov,et al.  Ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM): four-dimensional imaging and diffraction of nanostructures during phase transitions. , 2007, Nano letters.

[11]  P. Balcou,et al.  Observation of a Train of Attosecond Pulses from High Harmonic Generation , 2001, Science.

[12]  Eberhard Riedle,et al.  Phase-locked ultrashort pulse trains at separate and independently tunable wavelengths. , 2005, Optics letters.

[13]  A. Zewail,et al.  Breaking resolution limits in ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy , 2006, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[14]  J. Levesque,et al.  Tomographic imaging of molecular orbitals , 2004, Nature.

[15]  Thomas Pfeifer,et al.  Heterodyne mixing of laser fields for temporal gating of high-order harmonic generation. , 2006, Physical review letters.

[16]  N. Lawandy,et al.  Breaking the femtosecond barrier: a method for generating attosecond pulses of electrons and photons , 1995 .

[17]  J. Dwyer,et al.  Femtosecond electron diffraction: ‘making the molecular movie’ , 2006, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[18]  F. Légaré,et al.  Sub-laser-cycle electron pulses for probing molecular dynamics , 2002, Nature.

[19]  Maher Harb,et al.  Femtosecond electron pulse characterization using laser ponderomotive scattering. , 2006, Optics letters.

[20]  P. Corkum,et al.  Probing molecular dynamics with attosecond resolution using correlated wave packet pairs , 2003, Nature.

[21]  A. Zewail.  The fog that was not , 2001, Nature.

[22]  Lorenz S. Cederbaum,et al.  Giant Intermolecular Decay and Fragmentation of Clusters , 1997 .

[23]  T. Kanai,et al.  Quantum interference during high-order harmonic generation from aligned molecules , 2005, Nature.

[24]  C. Ruan,et al.  Ultrafast Electron Crystallography of Interfacial Water , 2004, Science.

[25]  A. Zewail.  4D ultrafast electron diffraction, crystallography, and microscopy. , 2006, Annual review of physical chemistry.

[26]  Huizhong Lu,et al.  Electron correlation and double ionization of a 1D H2 in an intense laser field , 2006 .

[27]  U. Kleineberg,et al.  Attosecond real-time observation of electron tunnelling in atoms , 2007, Nature.

[28]  Charles Varin,et al.  Relativistic attosecond electron pulses from a free-space laser-acceleration scheme , 2006 .

[29]  Herman Batelaan,et al.  Colloquium : Illuminating the Kapitza-Dirac effect with electron matter optics , 2007 .

[30]  Henry C. Kapteyn,et al.  High-Harmonic Generation of Attosecond Pulses in the ``Single-Cycle'' Regime , 1997 .

[31]  Ahmed H. Zewail Prof..  Chemistry at the Uncertainty Limit , 2001 .

[32]  F. Krausz,et al.  Sub-fs electron pulses for ultrafast electron diffraction , 2006 .

[33]  A. Zewail,et al.  Atomic-scale imaging in real and energy space developed in ultrafast electron microscopy. , 2007, Nano letters.

[34]  Ahmed H. Zewail,et al.  4D Visualization of Transitional Structures in Phase Transformations by Electron Diffraction , 2007, Science.

[35]  I. Christov,et al.  Harnessing Attosecond Science in the Quest for Coherent X-rays , 2007, Science.

[36]  O. J. Luiten,et al.  How to realize uniform three-dimensional ellipsoidal electron bunches. , 2004, Physical review letters.

[37]  L. Poletto,et al.  Isolated Single-Cycle Attosecond Pulses , 2006, Science.

[38]  V. Lobastov,et al.  Four-dimensional ultrafast electron microscopy. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[39]  Ahmed H. Zewail,et al.  Direct Observation of the Transition State , 1995 .