Inelastic electron holography – first results with surface plasmons

Triebenberg Laboratory, Institute of Structure Physics, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany

^a e-mail: hannes.lichte@triebenberg.de

Received: 28 September 2010
Revised: 2 December 2010
Accepted: 10 December 2010
Published online: 7 June 2011

Abstract

Inelastic interaction and wave optics seem to be incompatible in that inelastic processes destroy coherence, which is the fundamental requirement for holography. In special experiments it is shown that energy transfer larger than some 10^-15 eV undoubtedly destroys coherence of the inelastic electron with the elastic remainder. Consequently, the usual inelastic processes, such as phonon-, plasmon- or inner shell-excitations with energy transfer of several meV out to several 10 eV, certainly produce incoherence with the elastic ones. However, it turned out that within the inelastic wave, “newborn” by the inelastic process, there is a sufficiently wide area of coherence for generating “inelastic holograms”. This is exploited to create holograms with electrons scattered at surface-plasmons, which opens up quantum mechanical investigation of these inelastic processes.