Abstract
Previous studies show that within paraxial limit and electric dipole approximations, the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of a Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) beam rotates the whole atom about the beam axis but does not affect the internal electronic motion. The contribution of the Gaussian part of the LG beam profile to the angular momentum exchange is not usually taken into account. In this paper, we develop a theory which shows that not only the OAM of a LG beam, but also the geometry of the beam cross section, plays an important role in the electronic lowest-order transitions in the interaction of the beam with a trapped Rydberg atom, due to the large span of its electronic wavefunctions. In this interaction, the standard dipole selection rules do not hold and our results show that the otherwise forbidden transitions can become sufficiently probable.
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