Trojan States of Electrons Guided by Bessel Beams

Iwo Bialynicki-Birula, Zofia Bialynicka-Birula and Bartosz Chmura

Previous work [I. Bialynicki-Birula, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 93}, 20402 (2004)] is extended to cover more realistic examples of electromagnetic waves, viz. the Bessel beams. It is shown that electrons may be guided by a Bessel beam with nonvanishing orbital angular momentum. The mechanism for trapping the electrons near the electromagnetic vortex line of such a wave field is the same as for the Trojan states of Rydberg electrons produced by a circularly polarized wave. The main difference is that in the present case the transverse motion of electrons in a beam is confined under the action of the electromagnetic wave alone, no additional attraction center is required. We also discuss briefly the motion of electrons in Neumann and Hankel beams.

Physics/0502025 (February 2005)