Elastic scattering of twisted neutrons by nuclei

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework for twisted neutron scattering by nuclei, revealing how orbital angular momentum influences observable effects like cross sections and polarization, and enabling new measurement techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism for twisted neutron scattering that accounts for interference effects and demonstrates how orbital angular momentum can be used to probe nuclear scattering amplitudes.

Findings

Orbital angular momentum affects scattering cross sections and spin asymmetries.

New techniques for measuring real and imaginary parts of scattering amplitudes.

Potential applications to other nuclear reactions with twisted particles.

Abstract

We present a theoretical formalism for scattering of the twisted neutrons by nuclei in a kinematic regime where interference between Coulomb interaction and the strong interaction is essential. Twisted neutrons have definite quantized values of an angular momentum projection along the direction of propagation, and we show that it results in novel observable effects for the scattering cross section, spin asymmetries and polarization of the scattered neutrons. We demonstrate that additional capabilities provided by beam's orbital angular momentum enable new techniques for measuring both real and imaginary parts of the scattering amplitude. Several possible observables are considered, for which the targets may be either well-localized with respect to the spatial beam profile, or the scattering occurs incoherently on nuclei in a bulk target. The developed approach can be applied to other nuclear reactions with strongly interacting twisted particles.