An electron Talbot interferometer

Abstract

We report the first demonstration of a Talbot interferometer for electrons. The interferometer was used to image the Talbot carpet behind a nanofabricated material grating. The Talbot interferometer design uses two identical gratings, and is particularly sensitive to distortions of the incident wavefronts. To illustrate this we used our interferometer to measure the curvature of concave wavefronts in a weakly focused electron beam. We describe how this wavefront curvature demagnified the Talbot revivals, and we discuss further applications for electron Talbot interferometers. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.