Attosecond Tomography and Elephants

[Joseph14]

I just read a paper about attosecond science and wavefunction tomography. This allows for "pictures" to be taken of the wavefunction of a bound electron including spatial and phase information. Is this "picture" a picture of a single electron from a certain particles wavefunction or is it actually a combination of information from a bunch of electron wavefunctions from aligned particles?

Maybe this analogy would help explain what I'm asking. Six blind men are sent out by the King to find what strange creature has been trampling the corn fields. The men report to the King different sorties. One says it is a large snake(trunk), another says a great moving wall(side), another says a living rope(tail), etc... The King puts all of this information together to create a picture of an elephant (similar to tomography) and declares it is an elephant. Now in this case it is possible that those piece of information all came from different elephants (so his picture isn't actually of a real elephant) or it could be the case that all the blind men got their observations it from a single elephant (his picture is of a real elephant).

In the case presented in the paper, where the wavefunction is imaged, is it possible that only a single molecule supplies all the information or does the experiment require multiple similar molecules to each supply a piece of information, meaning that the picture isn't actually of any particular particle, but rather a construct of a certain type of particle.

This link is for a direct download of the paper.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.164.360&rep=rep1&type=pdf

 

[azntoon]

In the paper, the authors discuss a technique called attosecond science and wavefunction tomography. This technique allows researchers to measure the wavefunction of an electron of a bound molecule and obtain information about its spatial and phase properties. The technique involves using an attosecond laser pulse to ionize the electron, which is then detected by a detector. The information obtained from the detector is used to construct a picture of the wavefunction of the electron. So, the answer to your question is that the picture is of a single electron from a certain particle's wavefunction and not a combination of information from multiple electron wavefunctions from aligned particles.