Artist’s view of individual electrons interacting with an optical whispering gallery mode as it circles a silica sphere. The matching between the velocities of the electron and the light-wave it is riding changes the quantum state of the electron, illustrated as a wider halo. Photo: Dr Murat Sivis
Artist's view of individual electrons interacting with an optical whispering gallery mode as it circles a silica sphere. The matching between the velocities of the electron and the light-wave it is riding changes the quantum state of the electron, illustrated as a wider halo. Photo: Dr Murat Sivis Research team led by the University of Göttingen succeeds in coupling free electrons to optical resonators When you speak softly in one of the galleries of St Paul's cathedral, the sound runs so easily around the dome that visitors anywhere on its circumference can hear it. This striking phenomenon has been termed the -whispering gallery- effect, and variants of it appear in many scenarios where a wave can travel nearly perfectly around a structure. Researchers from the University of Göttingen have now harnessed the effect to control the beam of an electron microscope by light. The results were published in Nature. In their experiments, the team of Dr Ofer Kfir and Professor Claus Ropers illuminated small spheres of glass with a laser, trapping light in a so-called -optical whispering-gallery mode-.
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