Origins and Demonstrations of Electrons with Orbital Angular Momentum

Published

January 9, 2017

Author(s)

Benjamin McMorran, Amit Agrawal, Peter Ercius, Vincenzo Grillo, Andrew Herzing, Tyler R. Harvey, Martin Linck

Abstract

The surprising message of the 1992 paper of Allen, Beijersbergen, Spreeuw, and Woerdman (ABSW) was that photons could exhibit orbital motion in free space, which subsequently launched advancements in optical manipulation, microscopy, quantum optics, communications, many more fields. It has recently been shown that this result also applies to quantum mechanical wavefunctions describing massive particles (matter waves). This article discusses how electron wavefunctions can be imprinted with quantized phase vortices in analogous ways to twisted light, demonstrating that charged particles with nonzero rest mass can exhibit orbital motion in free space. With ABSW as a bridge, connections are made between this recent work in electron vortex wavefunctions and much earlier works, extending a 175 year-old tradition in matter wave vortices.

Citation

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A-Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences

Volume

375

Issue

2087

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2015.0434

Local Download

Keywords

electron beams, optical angular momentum, electron vortex, matter wave interferometry

Citation

McMorran, B. , Agrawal, A. , Ercius, P. , Grillo, V. , Herzing, A. , Harvey, T. and Linck, M. (2017), Origins and Demonstrations of Electrons with Orbital Angular Momentum, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A-Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences, [online], https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2015.0434, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=921670 (Accessed October 10, 2025)