Studying highly relativistic vortex-electron beams by atomic scattering

Abstract

We explore the opportunities of using electron scattering by screened Coulomb potential as a tool to retrieve properties of the relativistic vortex beams of electrons, such as their transverse momentum and orbital angular momentum (OAM). We focus on relativistic and ultra-relativistic regimes of the electron energies of at least several MeV and higher, in which the transverse beam momentum is typically much smaller than its longitudinal momentum. Different scattering scenarios for the incident electron beam are considered. In particular, the scattering by a very wide target can be used to probe the electron transverse momentum when its values are larger than 10 keV. The scattering by a target of a width comparable to that of the incident beam allows one to obtain information about the electron OAM. Varying target sizes in the range from couple to hundreds of nanometers, one can in principle distinguish OAM values from several units of $\hbar$ up to thousands and more.