English

Diffraction by Circular and Triangular Apertures as a Diagnostic Tool of Twisted Matter Waves

Quantum Physics 2026-04-22 v3 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Accelerator Physics

Abstract

We study diffraction of twisted matter waves (electrons and light ions carrying orbital angular momentum /=0,±1,±2,\ell/\hbar=0,\pm1,\pm2,\ldots by circular and triangular apertures. Within the scalar Kirchhoff-Fresnel framework, circular apertures preserve cylindrical symmetry and produce ringlike far-field profiles whose radii and widths depend on |\ell| but are insensitive to its sign. In contrast, equilateral triangles break axial symmetry and yield structured patterns that encode both the magnitude and the sign of \ell. A transparent Fraunhofer mapping links detector coordinates to the Fourier plane, explaining the (+1)(|\ell|+1)-lobe rule and the sign-dependent rotation of the pattern. We validate these results for both ideal Bessel beams and localized Laguerre-Gaussian packets, and we cross-check them by split-step Fourier propagation of the time-dependent Schr"odinger equation. From these analyses we extract practical design rules (Fraunhofer distance, lattice pitch, detector sampling) relevant to OAM diagnostics with moderately relativistic electrons with Ekin0.1E_{\rm kin}\sim0.1 to 55 MeV and light ions with Ekin0.1E_{\rm kin}\sim0.1 to 11 MeV/u. Our results establish triangular diffraction as a simple, passive, and robust method for reading out the OAM content of structured quantum beams.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.00826,
  title  = {Diffraction by Circular and Triangular Apertures as a Diagnostic Tool of Twisted Matter Waves},
  author = {Maksim Maksimov and Nikita Borodin and Daria Kargina and Dmitry Naumov and Dmitry Karlovets},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.00826},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages, 13 figures; RevTeX 4.2; Accepted in Phys. Rev. A, DOI:10.1103/z2rs-2ryl

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:10:28.372Z