Light beams can be engineered to carry orbital angular momentum, with application as, for instance, optical 'spanners' — essentially a 'twisted' variant of the more familiar optical tweezers. Here it is shown that it is, in principle, possible to engineer similar behaviour into an electron beam. Such a beam could find use in a variety of spectroscopy and microscopy techniques.
- Masaya Uchida
- Akira Tonomura
