Electrons and photons connected in an electron microscope: it will change the quantum world

To improve quantum technology, scientists often need individual particles such as photons

(elementary particles of light) with special properties. But it's not that simple, so physicists have developed a new method that simultaneously generates two separate particles as a pair.

They successfully connected separate freeelectrons and photons in the electron microscope. In an experiment at the University of Göttingen, an electron microscope beam passes through an embedded optical chip manufactured at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The chip consists of a fiber optic link and a ring-shaped resonator that accumulates light by holding photons moving in a circle.

When an electron scatters in an initially emptyresonator, a photon is generated. In the process, the electron loses exactly as much energy as it takes for a photon to be created from virtually nothing in the resonator. As a result, two particles interact and combine, forming a pair. The improved measurement method allowed physicists to accurately determine the individual particles involved and their simultaneous manifestation.

With an electron-photon pair, physicists need to measureonly one particle to obtain information about the energy content and the temporal appearance of the second. So researchers can use one quantum particle in an experiment and at the same time confirm its presence by detecting another particle in the precursor circuit. Such a function will change quantum technologies by improving them.

The method will change electron microscopy. In the field of quantum optics, entangled pairs of photons are already enhancing images. Now such concepts can be explored with electrons.

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