Elastic scattering of Airy electron packets on atoms

Abstract

The problem of elastic scattering of electron Airy beams on potential fields is considered for a hydrogen atom in the ground state and for Yukawa potential. It is demonstrated that the angular dependence of the scattering probability density is in general azimuthally asymmetric. When the position of the atom happens to coincide with one the minima of the probability density of the Airy beam the asymmetric pattern is represented by four separated peaks. We show that this behaviour is very sensitive to the precision with which the relative position of the atom and the minima is defined and study how uncertainty in the position measured in terms of the transverse size of the wave-packet affects observation of azimuthal asymmetry. Finally, we consider a spatially localized target and discuss the difficulties of observing the azimuthal asymmetry for targets with sizes that exceed the critical value determined by the beam parameters and the position of the target center.