Department of Physics, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, Missouri 65409, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Jan 7;106(1):013001. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.013001. Epub 2011 Jan 5.
Usually, photons are described by plane waves with a definite 4-momentum. In addition to plane-wave photons, "twisted photons" have recently entered the field of modern laser optics; these are coherent superpositions of plane waves with a defined projection hm of the orbital angular momentum onto the propagation axis, where m is an integer. In this Letter, we show that it is possible to produce high-energy twisted photons by Compton backscattering of twisted laser photons off ultrarelativistic electrons. Such photons may be of interest for experiments related to the excitation and disintegration of atoms and nuclei, and for studying the photoeffect and pair production off nuclei in previously unexplored experimental regimes.
通常情况下，光子被描述为具有确定的 4-动量的平面波。除了平面波光子外，“扭曲光子”最近也进入了现代激光光学领域；这些是平面波的相干叠加，其轨道角动量的投影 hm 定义为传播轴，其中 m 是整数。在这封信中，我们表明可以通过超相对论电子对扭曲激光光子的康普顿背散射来产生高能扭曲光子。这种光子可能对与原子和原子核的激发和分解有关的实验以及在以前未探索的实验条件下研究原子核的光效应和对产生感兴趣。
