Observation of Hanbury Brown-Twiss anticorrelations for free electrons
Observation of Hanbury Brown-Twiss anticorrelations for free electrons
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DOI：
10.1038/nature00911
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发表时间：
2002-07-25
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Hasselbach, F
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Kiesel, H;Renz, A;Hasselbach, F
与经典粒子的随机序列相比，在相干照明区域内，源自不相关点源的光子计数率的波动略有增强。这种现象在天文学中被称为汉伯里·布朗-特威斯效应(1-5)，是两个不可区分的光子和玻色-爱因斯坦统计之间的量子干涉的结果(6)。后者要求复合玻色波函数是两个可能路径的对称叠加。对于费米子，相应的双粒子波函数是反对称的：这排除了重叠的波列，这是泡利不相容原理所禁止的。在这里，我们使用电子场发射器来相干地照亮两个探测器，并发现自由电子到达时间的反相关性。粒子束具有低简并性（相空间中每个晶胞大约有10(-4)个电子）；因此，我们的实验代表了光子汉伯里布朗-特威斯效应的费米子孪生。
Fluctuations in the counting rate of photons originating from uncorrelated point sources become, within the coherently illuminated area, slightly enhanced compared to a random sequence of classical particles. This phenomenon, known in astronomy as the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect(1-5), is a consequence of quantum interference between two indistinguishable photons and Bose-Einstein statistics(6). The latter require that the composite bosonic wavefunction is a symmetric superposition of the two possible paths. For fermions, the corresponding two-particle wavefunction is antisymmetric: this excludes overlapping wave trains, which are forbidden by the Pauli exclusion principle. Here we use an electron field emitter to coherently illuminate two detectors, and find anticorrelations in the arrival times of the free electrons. The particle beam has low degeneracy (about 10(-4) electrons per cell in phase space); as such, our experiment represents the fermionic twin of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect for photons.