Pair production from vacuum at the focus of an X-ray free electron laser

By A. Ringwald. 2001

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract There are definite plans for the construction of X-ray free electron lasers (FEL), both at DESY, where the so-called XFEL is part of the design of the electron–positron linear collider TESLA, as well as at SLAC, where the so-called Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) has been proposed. Such an X-ray laser would allow for high-field science applications: one could make use of not only the high energy and transverse coherence of the X-ray beam, but also of the possibility of focusing it to a spot with a small radius, hopefully in the range of the laser wavelength. Along this route one obtains very large electric fields, much larger than those obtainable with any optical laser of the same power. In this Letter we discuss the possibility of obtaining an electric field so high that electron–positron pairs are spontaneously produced in vacuum (Schwinger pair production). We find that if X-ray optics can be improved to approach the diffraction limit of focusing, and if the power of the planned X-ray FELs can be increased to the terawatt region, then there is ample room for an investigation of the Schwinger pair production mechanism.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Radiation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1673343c6247c9aeab157d7302d0d91e6c8b53a7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. C. Keitel
2. M. Meyer
3. G. Dunne
4. Mattias Marklund
5. K. Hatsagortsyan
6. H. Gies
7. Padma Kant Shukla

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Gregory V. Vereshchagin
2. A. Piazza
3. S. Xue
4. C. Schubert
5. C. Keitel
6. M. Meyer
7. Shaul Mukamel
8. G. Dunne

In Radiation

1. C. Keitel
2. M. Meyer
3. G. Dunne
4. Henry C. Kapteyn
5. Mattias Marklund
6. K. Hatsagortsyan
7. Margaret M. Murnane
8. Padma Kant Shukla

Citations in the corpus

• Roadmap of ultrafast x-ray atomic and molecular physics (2018, background): “The x-ray intensity can be further increased by orders of magnitude through improvements in x-ray optics that would allow one to decrease the currently smallest achievable focus sizes of 50 nm to a sub-nm diffraction-limited spot with high efficiency, which would also be of interest for testing nonl”
• Nonlinear collective effects in photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions (2006, methodology): “Both at the TESLA collider at DESY and LCLS at SLAC, the energy density at the focus (with a spatial width∼ 10−10m and on the time-scale10−13 s) of the XFEL is expected to reach energy densities of1029 J/m3 (Ringwald, 2001a), see Fig.”
• Heisenberg-Euler Effective Lagrangians : Basics and Extensions (2004, background): “For an excellent recent review of the search for this remarkable phenomenon of vacuum pair production, see [14].”
• Electron-positron pairs in physics and astrophysics: from heavy nuclei to black holes (2009, background): “Based on these estimations, Ringwald concluded [60, 238, 239] that with present available techniques, the power density and electric fields of X-ray laser are far too small to produce a sizable Sauter-EulerHeisenberg-Schwinger effect.”
• Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems (2011, background): “In addition to pair creation in superstrong laser pulses of low frequency, the process is also extensively discussed in connection with the upcoming XFEL facilities (see, e.g., Alkofer et al., 2001 and Ringwald, 2001).”
• Worldline instantons and the fluctuation prefactor (2006, background): “The nonperturbative phenomenon of vacuum pair production [19, 20] has applications in many fields of physics [21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27].”