Feasibility of an Electron Orbital Angular Momentum Sorter

Whenever an electron interacts with matter, a range of information about the matter is encoded into the various degrees of freedom of the electron. Recently, free electrons with orbital angular momentum -or electron vortices -have been demonstrated in transmission electron microscopes [1-3], opening the door to a new range of information that could be extracted from samples. Optical vortices have been used to probe chirality in organic and biological samples, and incident electron vortices have been used to probe magnetic chirality However, optical probes have limited resolution in comparison to the available angstrom resolution of electron probes, and electron vortex probes present numerous experimental difficulties.