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Photon-Induced Near-Electron Microscopy Essay

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Photon-induced near-field electron microscopy (PINEM), a key UEM technique, is based on the photon-electron interaction [83]. The basic principle of PINEM can be explained as follows: in free space, an electron cannot absorb a quantum of electromagnetic energy because of the lack of energy-momentum conservation. However, in the presence of the nanostructure, the inelastic coupling between the free electrons and photons takes place [138, 139] due to the deceleration of the scattered photons and the stratification of the energy-momentum conservation condition. The coupling leads to gain/loss of photon quanta by electrons in the electron packet, which can be resolved in the electron energy spectrum [83, 140-142] This spectrum consists of …show more content…

[143]. The author imaged the photo-induced surface plasmonic standing wave on a metallic nanowire (Ag nanowire) (Fig. 13b). Also, he demonstrated the control of the spatial interference of the excitation plasmonic field. Also, the cross-correlation images of the excited surface plasmon were obtained by control the relative delay between the driver laser pulse and the electron pulse. Worth notes, the enhancement of the temporal resolution in UEM to tens of femtoseconds [19] might allow eventually to image the plasmonic dynamics and its evolving in time and space.
On the other hand, the indirect PINEM imagining (spectral mapping) enabled the envisage of excited surface plasmon on a subparticle scale [144]. This has been done by focusing the electron beam onto a single nanoparticle and record PINEM spectra at each spot on the particle surface then scan across the vicinity of the particle. This was repeated at different relative delay between the electron and optical pulse to obtain series of spectral mapping image as shown in Fig. 13c. PINEM has been also used to study the coherent quantum control of the free electron population state as demonstrated by Feist et al. [148]. This has been done by controlling the photo-induced Rabi oscillations in the populations of electron momentum states via changing the intensity of the optical driving field (Fig. 13d).

This work was conducted on a conical gold tip, the interaction of the electron and

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