Spatio-temporal vortex beams and angular momentum
arXiv:1205.3307 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.86.033824
Abstract
We present a space-time generalization of the known spatial (monochromatic) wave vortex beams carrying intrinsic orbital angular momentum (OAM) along the propagation direction. Generic spatio-temporal vortex beams are polychromatic and can carry intrinsic OAM at an arbitrary angle to the mean momentum. Applying either (i) a transverse wave-vector shift or (ii) a Lorentz boost to a monochromatic Bessel beam, we construct a family of either (i) time-diffracting or (ii) non-diffracting spatio-temporal Bessel beams, which are exact solutions of the Klein-Gordon wave equations. The proposed spatio-temporal OAM states are able to describe either photon or electron vortex states (both relativistic and nonrelativistic), and can find applications in particle collisions, optics of moving media, quantum communications, and astrophysics.
9 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. A
References in corpus (8)
- Semiclassical Dynamics of Electron Wave Packet States with Phase Vortices
- Twisting of light around rotating black holes
- Angular Momenta and Spin-Orbit Interaction of Nonparaxial Light in Free Space
- Experimental verification of the feasibility of a quantum channel between Space and Earth
- Goos-Hänchen and Imbert-Fedorov shifts of polarized vortex beams
- Atomic scale electron vortices for nanoresearch
- Colliding particles carrying non-zero orbital angular momentum
- Rows of optical vortices from elliptically perturbing a high-order beam