Generation of Gamma-ray Beam with Orbital Angular Momentum in the QED Regime

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method to generate high-energy gamma-ray photons carrying orbital angular momentum using laser-plasma interactions, demonstrated through advanced 3D quantum electrodynamics simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a new scheme for producing gamma-ray beams with OAM via laser-driven electron dynamics and quantum radiation transfer, validated by detailed simulations.

Findings

Successful transfer of OAM from laser to electrons and then to gamma-ray photons.

Ability to control topological charge and chirality of gamma-ray beams.

Simulation results show feasibility of generating high-energy OAM gamma rays.

Abstract

We propose a scheme to generate gamma-ray photons with an orbital angular momentum (OAM) and high energy simultaneously from laser-plasma interactions by irradiating a circularly polarized Laguerre-Gaussian laser on a thin plasma target. The spin angular momentum and OAM are first transferred to electrons from the driving laser photons, and then the OAM is transferred to the gamma-ray photons from the electrons through quantum radiation. This scheme has been demonstrated using three-dimensional quantum electrodynamics particle-in-cell simulation. The topological charge, chirality and carrier-envelope phase of the short ultra-intense vortex laser can be revealed according to the pattern feature of the energy density of radiated photons.