Paper | Title | Page |
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TUPMN097 | A Possibility for Using an APPLE Undulator to Generate a Photon Beam with Transverse Optical Modes | 1142 |
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Funding: Work supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Photons that carry orbital angular momentum are of great interest to the optics and laser communities*. This exotic property of photon beams was recently demonstrated in the x-ray regime** and may be useful to probe angular momentum in matter***. However, by comparison to the visible light regime, it is difficult to fabricate efficient achromatic optics to generate these optical modes in x-rays. In spite of these inconveniences, there has been no investigation of the possibility of using a synchrotron light source to directly generate an x-ray beam with transverse optical modes. In this paper, we investigate use of an APPLE-type undulator for generating Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) and Hermite-Gaussian (HG) mode beams. We find that the second harmonic radiation in the circular mode corresponds to an LG beam with l=1, and the second harmonic in the linear mode corresponds to an HG beam with l=1. The combination of an APPLE undulator and conventional monochromator optics may provide an opportunity for a new type of experimental research in the synchrotron radiation community. Detailed discussion will be presented in the conference. We thank C. Quitmann for insightful comments.
* M. Padgett, J. Courtial, L. Allen, Physics Today, p. 35, May, 2004.** A. G. Peele et al., Optics Letters, 27, 1752 (2002).*** M. VanVeenendaal and I. McNulty, Phys. Rev. Lett., submitted. |