Transferring orbital and spin angular momenta of light to atoms

Abstract

Light beams carrying orbital angular momentum, such as Laguerre-Gaussian beams, give rise to the violation of the standard dipolar selection rules during the interaction with matter yielding, in general, an exchange of angular momentum larger than hbar per absorbed photon. By means of ab initio 3D numerical simulations, we investigate in detail the interaction of a hydrogen atom with intense Gaussian and Laguerre-Gaussian light pulses. We analyze the dependence of the angular momentum exchange with the polarization, the orbital angular momentum, and the carrier-envelope phase of light, as well as with the relative position between the atom and the light vortex. In addition, a quantum-trajectory approach based on the de Broglie-Bohm formulation of quantum mechanics is used to gain physical insight into the absorption of angular momentum by the hydrogen atom.

References in corpus (2)

• Quantized Rotation of Atoms From Photons with Orbital Angular Momentum
• Entanglement of orbital angular momentum states between an ensemble of cold atoms and a photon

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Attosecond XUV vortices from high-order harmonic generation
• Generation of Intense High-Order Vortex Harmonics
• Applied Bohmian Mechanics
• Angular Momentum Transfer in Interaction of Laguerre-Gaussian Beams with Atoms and Molecules
• On Exchange of Orbital Angular Momentum Between Twisted Photons and Atomic Electrons
• Optical vortices discern attosecond time delay in electron emission from magnetic sublevels
• Absorption and Injection Models for Open Time-Dependent Quantum Systems