Ultrafast electron microscopy with relativistic femtosecond electron pulses

摘要

Ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM) with femtosecond temporal resolution is a 'dream machine' that has been long envisioned for the study of ultrafast structural dynamics in materials. For this purpose, we developed a prototype UEM with relativistic femtosecond electron pulses generated by a radio-frequency acceleration-based photoemission gun. TEM images of polystyrene latex particles and gold nanoparticles were observed using approximately 100-fs-long electron pulses with energies of 3.1 MeV. The effect of emittance and the number of pulses on the images were investigated. We demonstrated single-shot imaging with the femtosecond electron pulse at low magnification of approximately 500x.