Abstract
The recent development in the field of free electron beam manipulation has opened new possibilities of shaping electron wavepackets into electron vortex beams ( which is characterized by a typical doughnut shaped intensity profile and helical wavefront. Such beams carry quantisized orbital angular momentum.
On the other hand, it is known that under illumination, some nanostructures create chiral optical near fields The chirality of those fields can stem either from the intrinsic chirality of the structure itself 1 or from the spin orbit coupling effects of light. Here we propose a possible method for ultrafast near field chirality probing by utilizing the interplay between the helicities of two phase locked free electron modulating light field interactions We present theoretical proof of principle simulations describing the interaction of modulated free electron vortex beam with the chiral near field of a golden nanosphere illuminated by circularly polarized light field.