On Exchange of Orbital Angular Momentum Between Twisted Photons and Atomic Electrons

Abstract

We obtain an expression for the matrix element for a twisted (Laguerre-Gaussian profile) photon scattering from a hydrogen atom. We consider photons incoming with an orbital angular momentum (OAM) of $\ell \hslash$, carried by a factor of $e^{i\ell \varphi }$ not present in a plane-wave or pure Gaussian profile beam. The nature of the transfer of $+2\ell$ units of OAM from the photon to the azimuthal atomic quantum number of the atom is investigated. We obtain simple formulae for these OAM flip transitions for elastic forward scattering of twisted photons when the photon wavelength $\lambda$ is large compared with the atomic target size $a$, and small compared the Rayleigh range $z_R$, which characterizes the collimation length of the twisted photon beam.

arXiv comment16 pages

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Generation of Intense High-Order Vortex Harmonics
• Off-axis excitation of hydrogenlike atoms by twisted photons
• Rutherford scattering of electron vortices
• Generalized excitation of atomic multipole transitions by twisted light modes
• Novel Properties of Twisted-Light Absorption
• Dynamic electron correlation in interactions of light with matter formulated in b-space
• Nonlinear Zel'dovich effect: Parametric amplification from medium rotation
• Atomic form factor for twisted vortex photons interacting with atoms
• Theoretical consideration of a twisted atom
• Conversion of twistedness from light to atoms