Regular Article

Twisted radiation from nonlinear Thomson scattering with arbitrary incident angle

¹ Department of Physics, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, P.R. China
² Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100094, P.R. China

^a e-mail: liuke@nudt.edu.cn
^b e-mail: tongpu@nudt.edu.cn

Received: 9 September 2019
Received in final form: 27 November 2019
Published online: 22 January 2020

Abstract

Thomson/Compton scattering is well-known as a scattering process between electromagnetic radiation and charged particles, which is found in laboratories and nature. Here, we investigate the radiative properties of nonlinear Thomson scattering with arbitrary incident angle. Based on classical electrodynamics, the analytical universal expressions of the electric field and energy spectrum of the radiation emitted by a relativistic electron scattering of circularly polarized laser field are derived. It is shown that the spatial distributions of the radiation energy of high-order harmonics have annular shapes and the symmetry of the annular shapes is strongly affected by the incident angle, which may relate with the angular momentum of twisted high-order harmonics. These results would help the understanding of the properties of twisted γ/X-ray and high energy electron-laser scattering experiments in laboratory.