We explore the potential of twisted light, a structured beam carrying orbital angular momentum, as a tool to unveil many-body effects in parabolically confined systems. According to the generalized Kohn theorem, the dipole response of such a multiparticle system to a spatially homogeneous probe is indistinguishable from the response of a system of noninteracting particles. Twisted light however can excite internal degrees of freedom, resulting in the appearance of new peaks in the multipole spectrum which are not present when the probe is a plane wave. We also demonstrate the ability of the proposed twisted light probe to capture the transition of interacting fermions into a strongly correlated regime in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. We report that, by suitable choice of the probe's parameters, the transition into a strongly correlated phase manifests itself as an approaching and ultimate superposition of peaks in the second-order quadrupole response. These features are observed in exact calculations for two electrons and well reproduced in adiabatic time-dependent density-functional theory simulations.

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• Quantum harmonic oscillator
• Quantum wells
• Quantum wires
• Strongly correlated systems
• Density functional calculations
• Density functional theory
• Exact solutions for many-body systems
• Laser techniques
• Optical absorption spectroscopy