High-Energy Recollision Processes of Laser-Generated Electron-Positron Pairs

Abstract

Two oppositely charged particles created within a microscopic space-time region can be separated, accelerated over a much larger distance, and brought to a recollision by a laser field. Consequently, new reactions become feasible, where the energy absorbed by the particles is efficiently released. By investigating the laser-dressed polarization operator, we identify a new contribution describing high-energy recollisions experienced by an electron-positron pair generated by pure light when a gamma photon impinges on an intense, linearly polarized laser pulse. The energy absorbed in the recollision process over the macroscopic laser wavelength corresponds to a large number of laser photons and can be exploited to prime high-energy reactions. Thus, the recollision contribution to the polarization operator differs qualitatively and quantitatively from the well-known one, describing the annihilation of an electron-positron pair within the microscopic formation region.

7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (9)

• All-optical Compton gamma-ray source
• Dynamically assisted Schwinger mechanism
• Finite size effects in stimulated laser pair production
• Photon polarisation in electron-seeded pair-creation cascades
• Photon polarisation in light-by-light scattering: finite size effects
• Polarization operator approach to pair creation in short laser pulses
• Laser photon merging in an electromagnetic field inhomogeneity
• Production of high energy particles in laser and Coulomb fields and e^+e^- antenna
• Muon pair creation from positronium in a linearly polarized laser field

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Journeys from Quantum Optics to Quantum Technology
• Strong-Field Breit-Wheeler Pair Production in Two Consecutive Laser Pulses with Variable Time Delay
• Non-linear Breit-Wheeler pair production in collisions of bremsstrahlung $\gamma -$quanta and a tightly focussed laser pulse
• Strong-field vacuum polarisation with high energy lasers
• Nonlinear neutrino-photon interactions inside strong laser pulses
• Fundamental constants from photon-photon scattering in three-beam collisions
• MP3 White Paper 2021 -- Research Opportunities Enabled by Co-locating Multi-Petawatt Lasers with Dense Ultra-Relativistic Electron Beams
• A cascade of $e^{-}{e}^{+}$ pair production by a photon with subsequent annihilation to a single photon in a strong magnetic field
• Production of Higgs boson in association with a pair of fermions in the presence of a circularly polarized laser field