For steady currents in vacuum, Ampère's law is . A rectangular loop with one long side inside an ideal long solenoid and the other outside gives , because the exterior field is negligible and the perpendicular sides contribute zero. Thus , approximately uniform away from the ends.
Write the electron electric charge as , with . The Lorentz force is ; it does no work. For perpendicular motion, gives
Here is the positive angular speed; the rotation sense is determined by the negative electron electric charge.
The parallel velocity is unaffected, while the perpendicular component rotates. Hence the path is a helix with and . For on-axis entry into a solenoidal tube, the transverse circle passes through that axis: its guiding centre is displaced by , and its maximum distance from the tube axis is , not .
Figure 1.
End-on electron orbit: the circle passes through the tube axis and reaches twice its Larmor radius from it
. Details.
Using the nonrelativistic approximation appropriate to ,
The cyclotron period is , so the flight lasts revolutions. The electron therefore crosses the axis again four times before leaving. At , . Wall clearance requires , giving
The transit is longer than a full orbit, so the maximum transverse excursion really is sampled before exit.
For the solenoidal time-of-flight energy window, the prescribed time fixes , while . Therefore
These are total kinetic energies. The upper value is the ideal grazing limit; if touching the wall counts as rejection, it is a supremum approached from below.