Elastic scattering of twisted electrons by diatomic molecules

Abstract

The elastic scattering of twisted electrons by diatomic molecules is studied within the framework of the non-relativistic first Born approximation. In this process, the coherent interaction of incident electrons with two molecular centers may cause interference patterns in the angular distributions of outgoing particles. We investigate how this Young-type interference is influenced by the complex internal structure of twisted beams. In particular, we show that the corkscrew-like phase front and the inhomogeneous intensity profile of the incident beam can strongly modify the angular distribution of electrons, scattered off a single well-localized molecule. For the collision with a macroscopic target, composed of randomly distributed but aligned molecules, the angular-differential cross section may reveal valuable information about the transverse and longitudinal momenta of twisted states. In order to illustrate the difference between the scattering of twisted and plane-wave beams for both, single-molecule and macroscopic-target scenarios, detailed calculations have been performed for a H_2 target.