• Corpus ID: 252532036

Direct evidence of a continuous transition between waves and particles

@inproceedings{Kisielowski2022DirectEO,
  title={Direct evidence of a continuous transition between waves and particles},
  author={Christian Kisielowski and Petra Specht and Stig Helveg and Fujun Chen and Bert Freitag and Joerg R. Jinschek and Dirk Van Dyck},
  year={2022}
}

• C. Kisielowski, P. Specht, +4 authors D. Dyck
• Published 23 September 2022
• Physics

The correlation between particle and wave descriptions of electron-matter interactions is analyzed by measuring the delocalization of an evanescent field using electron microscopy. Its spatial extension coincides with the energy-dependent, self-coherence length of propagating wave packets that obey the time-dependent Schrödinger equation and undergo a Goos-Hänchen shift. In the Heisenberg limit they are created by self-interferences during coherent-inelastic Coulomb interactions with a decoherence phase Δφ = 0.5 rad and shrink to particle-like dimensions for energy losses of more than 1000 eV.