title: Spatial coherence of electron bunches extracted from an arbitrarily shaped cold atom electron source.
abstract: We describe the spatial coherence properties of a cold atom electron source in the framework of a quasihomogeneous wavefield. The model is used as the basis for direct measurements of the transverse spatial coherence length of electron bunches extracted from a cold atom electron source. The coherence length is determined from the measured visibility of a propagated electron distribution with a sinusoidal profile of variable spatial frequency. The electron distribution was controlled via the intensity profile of an atomic excitation laser beam patterned with a spatial light modulator. We measure a lower limit to the coherence length at the source of lc = 7.8 ± 0.9 nm.
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coherent X-ray Science, School of Physics, The University of Melbourne, 3010, Australia.
authors.forename: Sebastian D
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Saliba
authors.forename: Corey T
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Putkunz
authors.forename: David V
authors.initials: DV
authors.lastname: Sheludko
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: McCulloch
authors.forename: Keith A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Nugent
authors.forename: Robert E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Scholten