Breit-Wheeler process in very short electromagnetic pulses

Abstract

The generalized Breit-Wheeler process, i.e. the emission of $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ pairs off a probe photon propagating through a polarized short-pulsed electromagnetic (e.g.\ laser) wave field, is analyzed. We show that the production probability is determined by the interplay of two dynamical effects. The first one is related to the shape and duration of the pulse and the second one is the non-linear dynamics of the interaction of $e^{\pm }$ with the strong electromagnetic field. The first effect manifests itself most clearly in the weak-field regime, where the small field intensity is compensated by the rapid variation of the electromagnetic field in a limited space-time region, which intensifies the few-photon events and can enhance the production probability by orders of magnitude compared to an infinitely long pulse. Therefore, short pulses may be considered as a powerful amplifier. The non-linear dynamics in the multi-photon Breit-Wheeler regime plays a decisive role at large field intensities, where effects of the pulse shape and duration are less important. In the transition regime, both effects must be taken into account simultaneously. We provide suitable expressions for the $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ production probability for kinematic regions which can be used in transport codes.

32 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (9)

• QED cascades induced by circularly polarized laser fields
• Nonlinear Compton scattering in ultra-short laser pulses
• Momentum signatures for Schwinger pair production in short laser pulses with a sub-cycle structure
• Non-Linear Compton Scattering of Ultrashort and Ultraintense Laser Pulses
• Breit-Wheeler Process in Intense Short Laser Pulses
• Enhanced subthreshold electron-positron production in short laser pulses
• Infra-red divergences in plane wave backgrounds
• Photo-production of scalar particles in the field of a circularly polarized laser beam
• Influence of Laser Pulse Parameters on the Properties of e-e+ Plasmas Created from Vacuum

Cited by in corpus (30)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Charged particle motion and radiation in strong electromagnetic fields
• Semiclassical picture for electron-positron photoproduction in strong laser fields
• Electron-positron pair production in a bifrequent oscillating electric field
• Strongly enhanced pair production in combined high- and low-frequency laser fields
• Polarization operator approach to pair creation in short laser pulses
• Nonlinear trident pair production in an arbitrary plane wave: a focus on the properties of the transition amplitude
• Measuring the Boiling Point of the Vacuum of Quantum Electrodynamics
• Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair creation with bremsstrahlung $\gamma$ rays
• Non-linear Breit-Wheeler process in short laser double-pulses
• Higher fidelity simulations of nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair creation in intense laser pulses
• High-Energy Recollision Processes of Laser-Generated Electron-Positron Pairs
• Determination of the carrier envelope phase for short, circularly polarized laser pulses
• Coherent combs of anti-matter from nonlinear electron-positron pair creation
• Non-linear Breit-Wheeler process with linearly polarized beams
• Pulse envelope effects in nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair-creation
• Pair creation by collision of intense laser pulse with high-frequency photon beam
• Spectral caustics in laser assisted Breit-Wheeler process
• Numerical approach to the semiclassical method of pair production for arbitrary spins and photon polarization
• Quantum processes in short and intensive electromagnetic fields
• Non-linear Breit-Wheeler pair production in collisions of bremsstrahlung $\gamma -$quanta and a tightly focussed laser pulse
• Pair production by Schwinger and Breit-Wheeler processes in bi-frequent fields
• Laser pulse-length effects in trident pair production
• Multi-photon regime of non-linear Breit-Wheeler and Compton processes in short linearly and circularly polarized laser pulses
• Efficiently parallelized modeling of tightly focused, large bandwidth laser pulses
• Axion-like-particle decay in strong electromagnetic backgrounds
• Laser pulse-shape dependence of Compton scattering
• Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler process in the collision of a photon with two plane waves
• Strong-field Breit-Wheeler pair production with bremsstrahlung gamma-rays in the perturbative-to-nonperturbative transition regime
• Strong-field QED in Furry-picture momentum-space formulation: Ward identities and Feynman diagrams