Design for light-based spherical aberration correction of ultrafast electron microscopes

We theoretically demonstrate that ponderomotive interactions near the electron cross-over can be used for aberration correction in ultrafast electron microscopes. Highly magnified electron shadow images from Si$_3$N$_4$ thin films are utilized to visualize the distortions induced by spherical aberrations. Our simulations of electron-light interactions indicate that spherical aberrations can be compensated resulting in an aberration free angle of \SI{8.1}{mrad}. For achieving the necessary light distribution, we use a gradient descent algorithm to optimize Zernike polynomials and shape the light beam into a modified Gaussian and Laguerre-Gaussian beam.