TY - JOUR

T1 - Elastic scattering of twisted neutrons by nuclei

AU - Afanasev, A. V.

AU - Karlovets, D. V.

AU - Serbo, V. G.

N1 - Funding Information: We would like to thank D. Pushin, W. M. Snow, and A. Surzhykov for useful discussions. The analysis in Secs. and is supported by the Government of the Russian Federation through the ITMO Fellowship and Professorship Program. The calculations for the localized targets in Secs. and are supported by the Russian Science Foundation (Project No. 17-72-20013). Publisher Copyright: © 2021 American Physical Society. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021/5

Y1 - 2021/5

N2 - We present a theoretical formalism for scattering of twisted neutrons by nuclei in a kinematic regime where interference between the Coulomb interaction and the strong interaction is essential. Twisted neutrons have definite quantized values of an angular momentum projection along the direction of propagation, and we show that this results in novel observable effects for the scattering cross section, spin asymmetries, and polarization of the scattered neutrons. We demonstrate that additional capabilities provided by a beam's orbital angular momentum enable new techniques for measuring both real and imaginary parts of the scattering amplitude. Several possible observables are considered, for which the targets may be either well localized with respect to the spatial beam profile or the scattering occurs incoherently on nuclei in a bulk target. The developed approach can be applied to other nuclear reactions with strongly interacting twisted particles.

AB - We present a theoretical formalism for scattering of twisted neutrons by nuclei in a kinematic regime where interference between the Coulomb interaction and the strong interaction is essential. Twisted neutrons have definite quantized values of an angular momentum projection along the direction of propagation, and we show that this results in novel observable effects for the scattering cross section, spin asymmetries, and polarization of the scattered neutrons. We demonstrate that additional capabilities provided by a beam's orbital angular momentum enable new techniques for measuring both real and imaginary parts of the scattering amplitude. Several possible observables are considered, for which the targets may be either well localized with respect to the spatial beam profile or the scattering occurs incoherently on nuclei in a bulk target. The developed approach can be applied to other nuclear reactions with strongly interacting twisted particles.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107311122&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevC.103.054612

DO - 10.1103/PhysRevC.103.054612

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85107311122

VL - 103

JO - Physical Review C

JF - Physical Review C

SN - 2469-9985

IS - 5

M1 - 054612

ER -