2025/10/17 by Dingguo Zheng, Zheng, Dingguo, Ofer Kfir +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Materials Science · #Advanced Electron Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Electron and X-Ray Spectroscopy Techniques #FOS: Physical sciences #Near-Field Optical Microscopy #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.15584
openalex publication_date 2025/10/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The quantum coupling between free-electrons and photons enables applying quantum optics techniques in electron microscopy. Here, we formulate the elastic electron-photon quantum coupling and its possible implications. Our analysis shows that when an electron traverses the field of an optical cavity, it induces a phase shift onto its confined photonic mode, which can be quantified as a refractive index of a free electron. This principle can be applied to counting electrons in a beam without changing its quantum states. The elastic scattering operator forms an electron-counting dispersive Hamiltonian for electron-photon systems within electron microscope, and it could enable quantum- and sub-shot-noise sensing and imaging at the Å-scale.