Emission of twisted photons by a Dirac electron in a strong magnetic field

Abstract

We study spontaneous emission of a photon during the transitions between relativistic Landau states of an electron in a constant magnetic field that can reach the Schwinger value of $H_c = 4.4 \times 10^9$ T. In contrast to the conventional method in which detection of both the final electron and the photon is implied in a certain basis, here we derive the photon state as it evolves from the process itself. It is shown that the emitted photon state represents a twisted Bessel beam propagating along the field axis with a total angular momentum (TAM) projection onto this axis $\ell-\ell'$ where $\ell$ and $\ell'$ are the TAM of the initial electron and of the final one, respectively. Thus, the majority of the emitted photons turn out to be twisted with $\ell-\ell' \gtrsim 1$, even when the magnetic field reaches the critical value of $H\sim H_c$. The transitions without a change of the electron angular momentum, $\ell'=\ell$, are possible, yet much less probable. We also compare our findings with those for a spinless charged particle and demonstrate their good agreement for the transitions without change of the electron spin projection even in the critical fields, while the spin-flip transitions are generally suppressed. In addition, we argue that whereas the ambiguous choice of an electron spin operator affects the differential probability of emission, this problem can partially be circumvented for the photon evolved state because it is the electron TAM rather than the spin alone that defines the TAM of the emitted twisted photon.