A spin-polarized electron beam has been used as the probe beam in a transmission electron microscope by using a photocathode electron gun with a photocathode made of a GaAs–GaAsP strained superlattice semiconductor with a negative electron affinity (NEA) surface. This system had a spatial resolution of the order of 1 nm for at 30 keV and it can generate an electron beam with an energy width of 0.24 eV without employing monochromators. This narrow width suggests that a NEA photocathode can realize a high energy resolution in electron energy-loss spectroscopy and a longitudinal coherence of 3 × 10−7 m.
The brightness and interference fringes of a spin-polarized electron beam extracted from a semiconductor photocathode excited by laser irradiation are directly measured via its use in a transmission electron microscope. The brightness was 3.8 × 107 A cm−2 sr−1 for a 30-keV beam energy with the polarization of 82%, which corresponds to 3.1 × 108 A cm−2 sr−1 for a 200-keV beam energy. The resulting electron beam exhibited a long coherence length at the specimen position due to the high parallelism of (1.7 ± 0.3) × 10−5 rad, which generated interference fringes representative of a first-order correlation using an electron biprism. The beam also had a high degeneracy of electron wavepacket of 4 × 10−6. Due to the high polarization, the high degeneracy and the long coherence length, the spin-polarized electron beam can enhance the antibunching effect.
Pulse-mode operation was realized in spin-polarized transmission electron microscopy (SP-TEM) using a laser-driven electron gun with a GaAs-GaAsP strained-layer-superlattice photocathode. TEM images were acquired with a pulsed electron beam with a 5-μs pulse duration. Phase locking of wobbling TEM images was demonstrated using a pulsed beam with a 1-kHz repetition frequency, which matched the image wobbling frequency. It was found that in composite images formed by superimposing 2 × 10(4) separate single-pulse exposures, the amount of image blurring due to wobbling was a linear function of the pulse duration. These results suggest the possibility of pump-probe measurements in SP-TEM using the pulsed electron beam as a probe, allowing nanometer-scale time-resolved spin mapping.
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