Coherent Excitation of Bound Electron Quantum State With Quantum Electron Wavepackets

We present a fully quantum model for the excitation of a bound electron based on the “free-electron bound-electron resonant interaction” (FEBERI) scheme. The bound electron is modeled as a quantum two-level system (TLS) at any initial quantum (qubit) state, and the free electron is presented as a pre-shaped quantum electron wavepacket (QEW). In the case that the QEW is short or modulated at optical frequency, the TLS quantum state may be coherently controlled with multiple modulation-correlated QEWs. For this case, we derive the transition probability of the TLS due to interaction with a multi-particle beam based on an analytical approximate solution of the Schrodinger equation that amounts to using Born’s probabilistic interpretation of the quantum electron wavefunction. We verify the credibility of the analytical model at its validity ranges using a fully quantum density matrix computation procedure. It is shown that the transition probability can grow quadratically with the number of correlated QEWs and exhibit Rabi oscillation. The study indicates a possibility of engineering the quantum state of a TLS by utilizing a beam of shaped QEWs.