Radiative recombination of twisted electrons with bare nuclei: going beyond the Born approximation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the relativistic radiative recombination of twisted electrons with bare nuclei, analyzing how electron twist affects photon emission properties, and explores potential applications in atomic physics and beam diagnostics.

Contribution

It provides a fully relativistic wave function approach beyond the Born approximation for twisted electrons interacting with nuclei, including various experimental scenarios and superposition states.

Findings

Photon polarization and angular distribution are highly sensitive to electron twist.

The approach extends to nonrelativistic cases with analytical expressions.

Recombination can be used for atomic studies and vortex beam diagnostics.

Abstract

We present a fully relativistic investigation of the radiative recombination of a twisted electron with a bare heavy nucleus. The twisted electron is described by the wave function which accounts for the interaction with the nucleus in all orders in $\alpha Z$. We use this wave function to derive the probability of the radiative recombination with a single ion being shifted from the twisted electron propagation direction. We also consider more realistic experimental scenarios where the target is either localized (mesoscopic) or infinitely wide (macroscopic). The situation when the incident electron is a coherent superposition of two vortex states is considered as well. For the nonrelativistic case we present analytical expressions which support our numerical calculations. We study in details the influence of the electron twistedness on the polarization and angular distribution of the emitted photon. It is found that these properties of the outgoing photon might be very sensitive to the total angular momentum and kinematic properties of twisted beams. Therefore, the recombination of the twisted electrons can serve as a valuable tool for atomic investigations as well as for the diagnostics of the vortex electron beams.