High-energy attosecond-width electron diffraction simulations

Abstract

Electron microscopy has been the recent subject of molecular imaging due to the strength of the electrons' interaction with the target molecule making for a detailed pattern at a small scale.[1] To achieve the best 4D image of the target, one needs sufficient spatial and temporal resolution, the prior being an issue of using electrons in the keV regime as to achieve an optimally small deBroglie wavelength, and the latter being improved by the temporal width of the electron wave packet itself.[2] In order to image the motion of the electronic structure of the target molecule, this width must be within the attosecond regime. In this paper, we use the computational method of time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) to model our targets of Beryllium and the Nitrogen molecule, N2 , and an incoming electron wave packet with an energy of 1500 eV.