Spatiotemporal vortex beams and angular momentum

By K. Bliokh, Franco Nori. 2012

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a space-time generalization of the known spatial (monochromatic) wave vortex beams carrying intrinsic orbital angular momentum (OAM) along the propagation direction. Generic spatio-temporal vortex beams are polychromatic and can carry intrinsic OAM at an arbitrary angle to the mean momentum. Applying either (i) a transverse wave-vector shift or (ii) a Lorentz boost to a monochromatic Bessel beam, we construct a family of either (i) time-diffracting or (ii) non-diffracting spatio-temporal Bessel beams, which are exact solutions of the Klein-Gordon wave equations. The proposed spatio-temporal OAM states are able to describe either photon or electron vortex states (both relativistic and nonrelativistic), and can find applications in particle collisions, optics of moving media, quantum communications, and astrophysics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/789a5ee78d070d15e430824e62c1319026b1111b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Franco Nori
2. K. Bliokh
3. Mohamed Babiker
4. Jun Yuan
5. G. Thirunavukkarasu
6. S. Lloyd
7. Sahel Ashhab
8. A. Bekshaev

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Franco Nori
2. K. Bliokh
3. Mohamed Babiker

Citations in the corpus

• Electron vortices: Beams with orbital angular momentum (2017, background): “The vortex propagation direction may be transverse (Gallatin and McMorran, 2012), parallel (Bliokh et al., 2012; Greenshields et al., 2012) to the direction of the field or in an arbitrary orientation (Greenshields et al., 2014), and the interaction between the magnetic moment with the external…”
• Transverse and longitudinal angular momenta of light (2015, background): “This question was recently examined by Bliokh and Nori [47], and it was concluded that such transverse intrinsic orbital AM can naturally occur in polychromatic fields with non-stationary intensity distributions.”
• Free-space propagation of spatiotemporal optical vortices (2019, background): “Standard OAM vortices embedded in short pulse beams [8-10], necessarily polychromatic, have also been experimentally and theoretically studied, while theoretical work has explored polychromatic vortices that can exist in space-time [11].”