Nonlinear collective effects in photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions

By Mattias Marklund, Padma Kant Shukla. 2006

880 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Strong-field effects in laboratory and astrophysical plasmas and high intensity laser and cavity systems are considered, related to quantum electrodynamical (QED) photon-photon scattering. Current state-of-the-art laser facilities are close to reaching energy scales at which laboratory astrophysics will become possible. In such high energy density laboratory astrophysical systems, quantum electrodynamics will play a crucial role in the dynamics of plasmas and indeed the vacuum itself. Developments such as the free-electron laser may also give a means for exploring remote violent events such as supernovae in a laboratory environment. At the same time, superconducting cavities have steadily increased their quality factors, and quantum nondemolition measurements are capable of retrieving information from systems consisting of a few photons. Thus, not only will QED effects such as elastic photon-photon scattering be important in laboratory experiments, it may also be directly measurable in cavity experiments. Here implications of collective interactions between photons and photon-plasma systems are described. An overview of strong field vacuum effects is given, as formulated through the Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian. Based on the dispersion relation for a single test photon traveling in a slowly varying background electromagnetic field, a set of equations describing the nonlinear propagation of an electromagnetic pulse on a more » radiation plasma is derived. The stability of the governing equations is discussed, and it is shown using numerical methods that electromagnetic pulses may collapse and split into pulse trains, as well as be trapped in a relativistic electron hole. Effects, such as the generation of novel electromagnetic modes, introduced by QED in pair plasmas is described. Applications to laser-plasma systems and astrophysical environments are also discussed. « less

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4b9749617332bfec399e987fee7ec8a81fc85a8

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Citations in the corpus

Laser-driven particle and photon beams and some applications (2010, background): “The production of electron positron pairs by the interaction of relativistic superthermal electrons generated by ultraintense laser pulses with a high Z material was considered theoretically and has been reviewed (Galy et al 2007, Liang et al 1998, Marklund and Shukla 2006, Yoneda 2001).”
Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems (2011, background): “Also in the same year another review was published on nonlinear collective photon interactions, including vacuum-polarization effects in a plasma (Marklund and Shukla, 2006).”
Coupling functions:universal insights into dynamical interaction mechanisms (2017, background): “…a broader sense for non-oscillatory, non-dynamical, systems, spread over many different fields, including for example quantum plasma interactions (Marklund and Shukla, 2006; Shukla and Eliasson, 2011), solid state physics (Farid, 1997; Higuchi and Yasuhara, 2003; Zhang, 2013), interactions in…”
Colloquium : nonlinear collective interactions in quantum plasmas with degenerate electron fluids (2010, background): “…Glenzer and Redmer, 2009; Glenzer et al., 2007; Hu and Keitel, 1999; Kritcher et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2009; Lindl, 1995; Malkin et al., 2007; Marklund and Shukla, 2006; Mendonça, 2001; Neumayer et al., 2010; Salamin et al., 2006; Son and Fisch, 2005) for inertial confinement fusion (Azechi…”