Scattering of electrons by a cylindrical potential well in a powerful low-frequency radiation field

Summary

We consider the scattering of electrons by a cylindrical potential well in a powerful low-frequency radiation field. As a special case we also discuss the scattering by a «hard» cylinder. The electrons are described nonrelativistically, and the laser field is treated in the dipole approximation. This puts certain restrictions on the intensity of the laser. By choosing the laser field to be circularly polarized and to propagate in the direction of the axis of the cylinder (taken as thez-axis), our two-dimensional scattering process in the (x, y)-plane has a large amount of symmetry. If the energy of the laser quanta is much less than the energy of the scattered electrons, the above problem can be solved exactly, and explicit analytic expressions can by derived, in particular for the differential and total scattering lengths dL _n andL _n respectively, describing the scattering of electrons while they are absorbing or emittingn quanta of the laser pulse. Our present paper is a straightforward generalization of our earlier work on laser-assisted scattering by a one-dimensional square well potential (J. Opt. Soc. Am.,7, 537 (1990)) and it yields valuable information on the angular distributions of scattered electrons in a powerful radiation field.