Photon emission by vortex particles accelerated in a linac

TL;DR

This paper investigates photon emission from vortex particles with orbital angular momentum in accelerator fields, showing that such particles can be accelerated to relativistic energies with minimal OAM loss, confirming the robustness of vortex states.

Contribution

It introduces an effective model for photon emission from vortex particles in accelerator fields, demonstrating the stability and feasibility of accelerating vortex particles to high energies.

Findings

Vortex particles retain their angular momentum during acceleration.

Photon emission losses are negligible for typical accelerator fields.

Vortex quantum states are highly robust against photon emission losses.

Abstract

We study the photon emission by charged spinless particles with phase vortices and an orbital angular momentum (OAM) projection in longitudinal electric and magnetic fields within the scalar QED. A realistic wave packet of an electron or ion accelerated by a radio-frequency wave locally feels a constant and spatially homogeneous field, which allows us to develop an effective model for losing the angular momentum of the vortex particle due to photon emission. For the fields typical for accelerator facilities, we find that an effective lifetime of the vortex state greatly exceeds the acceleration time. This proves that the acceleration of vortex electrons, ions, muons, and so forth to relativistic energies is possible in conventional linacs, as well as in the wake-field accelerators with higher field gradients, the OAM losses due to the photon emission are mostly negligible, and that the vortex quantum state is highly robust against these losses.