Observation of Hanbury Brown–Twiss anticorrelations for free electrons

Harald Kiesel, Andreas Renz and Franz Hasselbach ()
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Harald Kiesel: Institut für Angewandte Physik der Universität Tübingen
Andreas Renz: Institut für Angewandte Physik der Universität Tübingen
Franz Hasselbach: Institut für Angewandte Physik der Universität Tübingen

Nature, 2002, vol. 418, issue 6896, 392-394

Abstract: Abstract 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 effect1,2,3,4,5, is a consequence of quantum interference between two indistinguishable photons and Bose–Einstein statistics6. 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.

Date: 2002
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DOI: 10.1038/nature00911

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