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.

arXiv comment14 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (14)

• Theory and applications of free-electron vortex states
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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Doing spin physics with unpolarized particles
• Elastic scattering of twisted neutrons by nuclei
• Effects of the transverse coherence length in relativistic collisions
• Recoil Momentum Effects in Quantum Processes Induced by Twisted Photons
• Twisted particle collisions: a new tool for spin physics
• Decay of the vortex muon
• Double-twisted spectroscopy with delocalized atoms
• Orbital angular momentum beam generation using a free-electron laser oscillator
• Production of twisted particles in heavy-ion collisions
• Universal Analytic Solution for the Quantum Transport of Structured Matter-Waves in Magnetic Optics
• Geometry-Enabled Radiation from Structured Paraxial Electrons
• Universal features of high-energy scattering of Laguerre-Gaussian states
• Vortex particles in axially symmetric fields and applications of the quantum Busch theorem