Diffraction by Circular and Triangular Apertures as a Diagnostic Tool of Twisted Matter Waves
Abstract
We study diffraction of twisted matter waves (electrons and light ions carrying orbital angular momentum 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 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 . A transparent Fraunhofer mapping links detector coordinates to the Fourier plane, explaining the -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 to MeV and light ions with to MeV/u. Our results establish triangular diffraction as a simple, passive, and robust method for reading out the OAM content of structured quantum beams.
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