Unveiling the orbital angular momentum and acceleration of electron beams

New forms of electron beams have been intensively investigated recently, including vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum, as well as Airy beams propagating along a parabolic trajectory. Their traits may be harnessed for applications in materials science, electron microscopy and interferometry, and so it is important to measure their properties with ease. Here we show how one may immediately quantify these beams' parameters without need for additional fabrication or non-standard microscopic tools. Our experimental results are backed by numerical simulations and analytic derivation.Comment: 2 figures in text, 2 in supplementar

Spectral and spatial shaping of Smith Purcell Radiation

The Smith Purcell effect, observed when an electron beam passes in the vicinity of a periodic structure, is a promising platform for the generation of electromagnetic radiation in previously-unreachable spectral ranges. However, most of the studies of this radiation were performed on simple periodic gratings, whose radiation spectrum exhibits a single peak and its higher harmonics predicted by a well-established dispersion relation. Here, we propose a method to shape the spatial and spectral far-field distribution of the radiation using complex periodic and aperiodic gratings. We show, theoretically and experimentally, that engineering multiple peak spectra with controlled widths located at desired wavelengths is achievable using Smith-Purcell radiation. Our method opens the way to free-electron driven sources with tailored angular and spectral response, and gives rise to focusing functionality for spectral ranges where lenses are unavailable or inefficient