e+e−-pair production by a focused laser pulse in vacuum

By N. Narozhny, S. V. Bulanov, V. Mur, V. Popov. 2004

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The probability of electron–positron pair creation by a focused laser pulse is calculated. For description of the focused laser pulse we use a 3-dimensional model of the electromagnetic field which is based on an exact solution of Maxwell equations. There exists two types of focused waves: e - and h -polarized waves with only either electric, or magnetic vector being transverse respectively. It is shown that pair production is possible only in e -polarized electromagnetic wave. The dependence of the pair production probability on the intensity of the laser pulse is obtained. It is argued that there exists a natural physical limit for attainable focused laser pulse intensities. This limit is posed by the pulse energy loss due to the effect of pair creation.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Mechanics of Materials, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/678a5c995a7ad5590bac437d1bce9916cfa1f7af

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Mechanics of Materials

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Citations in the corpus

Electron-positron pairs in physics and astrophysics: from heavy nuclei to black holes (2009, methodology): “These results have been considered of interest in the studies of pair production in free electron lasers [60, 238, 239, 261, 264], in optical lasers [472], of millicharged fermions in extensions of the standard model of particle physics [473], electromagnetic wave propagation in a plasma [269], as w”
Nonlinear collective effects in photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions (2006, background): “The prediction of Narozhny et al. (2004b) is that pair creation for colliding pulses is expected for intensities of the order 1026W/cm2, which is two orders of magnitude lower than for single pulse generation.”
Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems (2011, unknown): “Finally, we mention that, unlike a plane-wave field, a spatially focused laser beam is capable to produce e+-e− pairs from vacuum and this process has been investigated in Narozhny et al., 2004 for different field polarizations.”