ITMO’s Faculty of Physics finds electrons ‘twist’ to emit light without magnets

ITMO University physicists have demonstrated that electrons can emit microwave radiation photons even without a magnetic field, a phenomenon considered impossible under classical physics. The team’s calculations generalize the work of Lev Landau, who previously showed electron motion is quantized in a magnetic field, by examining behavior at the field’s edge. Researchers focused on how changing an electron’s wave properties, essentially “twisting” them, can lead to photon emission, with implications for improving particle accelerators and microscopes. “An interesting aspect of our work is that it considers several geometric effects,” said Igor…