Elastic scattering of Laguerre-Gaussian electron packets on atoms

Abstract: We explore elastic scattering of non-relativistic electrons in the form of standard Laguerre-Gaussian (sLG) and elegant Laguerre - Gaussian (eLG) packets on atomic targets in the generalized Born approximation and compare these results to the reference with Bessel-Gaussian (BG) packets. Scattering by hydrogen-like, iron, silver, and golden targets is considered. The incident electron carries a nonzero orbital angular momentum, while sLG and eLG packets have a definite radial quantum number n as well. In scattering of sLG and eLG wave packets by a macroscopic target sensitivity of the average cross section to the orbital angular momentum is observed, which is absent for BG packets. We highlight the opportunity to employ the differences in the experimental scattering results for the revelation of the properties of incident twisted electron wave packets