Surface Excitations, Energy Loss, and Decoherence in Electron Interferometry
A recent pedagogical paper by Strauch concretely demonstrated how interaction-mediated entanglement can suppress fringe visibility in a one-dimensional model of the electron double-slit experiment. Here we extend that framework to model actual experimental data from electron biprism interferometry. Kerker et al. showed that the macroscopic QED model of Scheel and Buhmann successfully describes their measured results. We show that this Scheel-Buhmann model can be recovered from Strauch's simplified framework by employing a Markov approximation and including thermal effects. The resulting decoherence rate is expressed in terms of mode-resolved scattering probabilities familiar from electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS), directly relating EELS to decoherence. The thermal dependence is significant in its own right, as recent theoretical work suggests that visibility reduction could serve as a non-invasive thermal probe for nanoscale systems. This progression from a toy model, to a quantitative account of real data, to a measurement application offers a case study in how simplified models can be made experimentally relevant.