Inelastic scattering and holography

The controversy about whether or not an inelastically scattered electron wa ve can still interfere with a reference wave is solved by treating the whol e problem rigorously and describing electron, source and object in one Hami ltonian. It turns out that, in principle, interference can occur between an inelastically scattered wave and a reference wave from the incident beam s pectrum provided the energy difference is smaller than about 10(-15) eV. Ho wever, it is argued that the density of states in source object and electro n wave is much too small to make this effect observable. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.