Relativistic Electron Vortex Beams: Angular Momentum and Spin-Orbit Interaction
Quantum Physics
2011-10-18 v3 Strongly Correlated Electrons
High Energy Physics - Theory
Optics
Abstract
Motivated by the recent discovery of electron vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum (AM), we construct exact Bessel-beam solutions of the Dirac equation. They describe relativistic and nonparaxial corrections to the scalar electron beams. We describe the spin and orbital AM of the electron with Berry-phase corrections and predict the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling in free space. This can be observed as a spin-dependent probability distribution of the focused electron vortex beams. Moreover, the magnetic moment is calculated, which shows different -factors for spin and orbital AM and also contains the Berry-phase correction.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1105.0331,
title = {Relativistic Electron Vortex Beams: Angular Momentum and Spin-Orbit Interaction},
author = {Konstantin Y. Bliokh and Mark R. Dennis and Franco Nori},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.0331},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett