Muon pair creation by two x-ray laser photons in the field of an atomic nucleus

Abstract

The generation of muon-antimuon pairs is calculated in the collision of an ultrarelativistic bare ion with an intense x-ray laser beam. The reaction proceeds nonlinearly via absorption of two laser photons. By systematic study throughout the nuclear chart we show that the interplay between the nuclear charge and size, along with the possibility of nuclear excitation leads to saturation of the total production rates for high-Z ions, in contrast to the usual Z^2 scaling for pointlike projectiles. The process is experimentally accessible by combining present-day ion accelerators with near-future laser sources and in principle allows for the measurement of nuclear form factors.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Nonlinear collective effects in photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions
• Electron-Positron Pair Production in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• Polarization operator approach to electron-positron pair production in combined laser and Coulomb fields
• Non-perturbative vacuum-polarization effects in proton-laser collisions
• Particle physics with a laser-driven positronium atom
• Production of high energy particles in laser and Coulomb fields and e^+e^- antenna

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• Few-Photon Electron-Positron Pair Creation by Relativistic Muon Impact on Intense Laser Beams
• Bound-free ${\mathbf{e}}^{+}{\mathbf{e}}^{-}$ pair creation with a linearly polarized laser field and a nuclear field
• Is the photon paramagnetic?
• Phenomenological model of multiphoto-production of charged pion pairs on the proton
• Sub-barrier pathways to Freeman resonances