Parameter space investigation for spin-dependent electron diffraction in the Kapitza-Dirac effect

TL;DR

This paper explores the conditions under which spin-dependent electron diffraction occurs in the Kapitza-Dirac effect, introducing a new optimization method to analyze various parameters and demonstrating the feasibility of experiments with low transverse electron momenta.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized measure for spin-dependent diffraction and applies a Newton gradient method to optimize and analyze the effect across different parameters.

Findings

Spin-dependent diffraction occurs over a broad range of electron momenta.

Low transverse electron momenta enable longer interaction times.

The method allows less restrictive experimental setups.

Abstract

We demonstrate that spin-dependent electron diffraction is possible for a smooth range of transverse electron momenta in a two-photon Bragg scattering scenario of the Kapitza-Dirac effect. Our analysis is rendered possible by introducing a generalized specification for quantifying spin-dependent diffraction, yielding an optimization problem which is solved by making use of a Newton gradient iteration scheme. With this procedure, we investigate the spin-dependent effect for different transverse electron momenta and different laser polarizations of the standing light wave Kapitza-Dirac scattering. The possibility for using arbitrarily low transverse electron momenta, when setting up a spin-dependent Kapitza-Dirac experiment allows longer interaction times of the electron with the laser and therefore enables less constraining parameters for an implementation of the effect.