Shifting physics of vortex particles to higher energies via quantum entanglement

Abstract

Physics of structured waves is currently limited to relatively small particle energies as the available generation techniques are only applicable to the soft $X$-ray twisted photons, to the beams of electron microscopes, to cold neutrons, or non-relativistic atoms. The highly energetic vortex particles with an orbital angular momentum would come in handy for a number of experiments in atomic physics, nuclear, hadronic, and accelerator physics, and to generate them one needs to develop alternative methods, applicable for ultrarelativistic energies and for composite particles. Here, we show that the vortex states of in principle arbitrary particles can be generated during photon emission in helical undulators, via Cherenkov radiation, in collisions of charged particles with intense laser beams, in such scattering or annihilation processes as $e\mu \to e\mu, ep \to ep, e^-e^+ \to p\bar{p}$, and so forth. The key element in obtaining them is the postselection protocol due to entanglement between a pair of final particles and it is largely not the process itself. The state of a final particle -- be it a $\gamma$-ray, a hadron, a nucleus, or an ion -- becomes twisted if the azimuthal angle of the other particle momentum is measured with a large error or is not measured at all. As a result, requirements to the beam transverse coherence can be greatly relaxed, which enables the generation of highly energetic vortex beams at accelerators and synchrotron radiation facilities, thus making them a new tool for hadronic and spin studies.