Design of a Scalable Integrated Nanophotonic Electron Accelerator on a Chip

Abstract

A simple way of implementing a scalable laser-driven nanophotonic electron accelerator on a chip is presented. The design requires only a single incident laser pulse and can be fabricated straightforwardly on commercial silicon-on-insulator wafers. We investigate the low-energy regime of tabletop electron microscopes where the silicon structures safely allow peak gradients of about 150 MeV/m. By means of a three-dimensional alternating-phase-focusing scheme, we obtain about half of the peak gradient as the average gradient with six-dimensional confinement and full-length scalability. The structures are completely designed within the device layer of the wafer and can be arranged in stages. We choose the stages as energy doublers and outline how errors in the handshake between the stages can be corrected by on-chip steerers. Since the electron pulse length in the attosecond realm is preserved, our chip is the ideal energy booster for ultrafast-electron-diffraction machines, opening the megaelectronvolt scale on tabletop setups.