Abstract
Electron energy-loss spectroscopy is a powerful tool for identifying the chemical composition of materials1,2,3,4,5. It relies mostly on the measurement of inelastic electrons, which carry specific atomic or molecular information. Inelastic electron scattering, however, has a very low intensity, often orders of magnitude weaker than that of elastically scattered electrons. Here, we report the observation of enhanced inelastic electron scattering from silver nanostructures, the intensity of which can reach up to 60% of its elastic counterpart. A home-made scanning probe electron energy-loss spectrometer6 was used to produce highly localized plasmonic excitations, significantly enhancing the strength of the local electric field of silver nanostructures. The intensity of inelastic electron scattering was found to increase nonlinearly with respect to the electric field generated by the tip–sample bias, providing direct evidence of nonlinear electron scattering processes.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant Nos. 2010CB923301 and 2010CB923304), the National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 10404026 and 20925311) and the MOE 211 project.
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W.J.L. and P.K.Z. contributed equally to this work. X.J.C. and K.Z.X. initiated the study. C.K.X., Y.L. and X.J.C. supervised the project. C.K.X. and X.J.C. designed the experiments. W.J.L., P.K.Z., M.L. and H.J.Z. performed the experiments. C.K.X., W.J.L., P.K.Z. and X.J.C. analysed the data. Y.L. proposed the theoretical model. C.K.X., Y.L. and X.J.C. interpreted the experiments and wrote the manuscript.
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Xu, C., Liu, W., Zhang, P. et al. Nonlinear inelastic electron scattering revealed by plasmon-enhanced electron energy-loss spectroscopy. Nature Phys 10, 753–757 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3051
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3051
