Pair production in counter-propagating laser beams
By J. Kirk, A. Bell, I. Arka. 2009
199 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Based on an analysis of a specific electron trajectory in counter-propagating beams, Bell and Kirk (2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 101 200403) recently suggested that laboratory lasers may shortly be able to produce significant numbers of electron–positron pairs. We confirm their results using an improved treatment of non-linear Compton scattering in the laser beams. Implementing an algorithm that integrates classical electron trajectories, we then examine a wide range of laser pulse shapes and polarizations. We find that counter-propagating, linearly polarized beams, with either aligned or crossed orientation, are likely to initiate a pair avalanche at intensities of approximately 1024 W cm−2 per beam. The same result is found by modelling one of the beams as a wave reflected at the surface of an overdense solid.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a59b2efdd3eed802bf9145a9c774616bbfb851a6
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Citations in the corpus
- Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems (2011, methodology): “…the emission of radiation by the electron was treated classically, i.e., the electron was supposed to loose energy and momentum continuously although in Kirk et al., 2009 the damping force-term in the LL equation was evaluated by employing the total emitted power calculated quantum mechanically.”
- Experimental Signatures of the Quantum Nature of Radiation Reaction in the Field of an Ultraintense Laser (2017, background): “This effect of a hard quantum cutoff can be phenomenologically included by multiplying the radiation reaction force in the LL equation by a “weighting” function gðχÞ 1⁄4 IQ=IC [41], where IQ is the quantum radiation intensity,”