Ion and electron beam nanofabrication of the which-way double-slit experiment in a transmission electron microscope

We have realized a which-way experiment closely resembling the original Feynman’s proposal exploiting focused ion beam milling to prepare two nano-slits and electron beam induced deposition to grow, selectively over one of them, electron transparent layers of low atomic number amorphous material to realize a which way detector for high energy electrons. By carrying out the experiment in an electron microscope equipped with an energy filter, we show that the inelastic scattering of electron transmitted through amorphous layers of different thicknesses provides the control of the dissipative interaction process responsible for the localization phenomena which cancels out the interference effects.