Pair creation in heavy ion channeling

Abstract

Heavy ions channeling through crystals with multi-GeV kinetic energies can create electron-positron pairs. In the framework of the ion, the energy of virtual photons arising from the periodic crystal potential may exceed the threshold $2m{c}^2$. The repeated periodic collisions with the crystal ions yield high pair production rates. When the virtual photon frequency matches a nuclear transition in the ion, the production rate can be resonantly increased. In this two-step excitation-pair conversion scheme, the excitation rates are coherently enhanced, and they scale approximately quadratically with the number of crystal sites along the channel.

References in corpus (9)

• Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems
• Prolific pair production with high-power lasers
• Dynamically assisted Schwinger mechanism
• A table-top laser-based source of femtosecond, collimated, ultra-relativistic positron beams
• Pair production in laser fields oscillating in space and time
• Electron-Positron Pair Production in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• Barrier control in tunneling e^+ e^- photoproduction
• Probing nonperturbative QED with optimally focused laser pulses
• Quantum interference between nuclear excitation by electron capture and radiative recombination