Kinematic surprises in twisted particle collisions

Abstract

"Twisted particles" refer to non-plane-wave states of photons, electrons, hadrons, or any other particle which carry non-zero, adjustable orbital angular momentum with respect to their average propagation direction. Twisted photons and electrons have already been experimentally demonstrated, and one can expect creation of twisted states of other particles in future. Such states can be brought in collisions, offering a completely new degree of freedom in collider experiments and, especially, a novel tool for hadronic physics. We recently showed that $2\to 1$ processes with two twisted particles such as resonance production in twisted $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation give access to observables which are difficult or impossible to probe in the usual plane-wave collisions. In this paper, we discuss in detail surprising kinematic features of this process, focusing on spinless particle annihilation. They include (1) a new dimension in the final momentum space available in twisted annihilation, (2) interference fringes emerging in the cross section as a function of the total energy, and (3) the built-in mass spectrometric capability of this process, that is, simultaneous production and automatic angular separation of several resonances with different masses in monochromatic twisted particle annihilation experiment running at fixed energy. All these features cannot be obtained in the usual plane wave collision setting.

14 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Semiclassical Dynamics of Electron Wave Packet States with Phase Vortices
• Colliding particles carrying non-zero orbital angular momentum
• Twisted electron in a strong laser wave
• Elastic scattering of vortex electrons provides direct access to the Coulomb phase
• Scattering of wave packets with phases
• Probing phase of a scattering amplitude beyond the plane-wave approximation
• Siberian snake-like behavior for an orbital polarization of a beam of twisted (vortex) electrons

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Double-twisted spectroscopy with delocalized atoms
• Vortex particles in axially symmetric fields and applications of the quantum Busch theorem