Scaling the Yield of Laser-Driven Electron-Positron Jets to Laboratory Astrophysical Applications

Abstract

We report new experimental results obtained on three different laser facilities that show directed laser-driven relativistic electron-positron jets with up to 30 times larger yields than previously obtained and a quadratic (~ E^2) dependence of the positron yield on the laser energy. This favorable scaling stems from a combination of higher energy electrons due to increased laser intensity and the recirculation of MeV electrons in the mm-thick target. Based on this scaling, first principles simulations predict the possibility of using such electron-positron jets, produced at upcoming high-energy laser facilities, to probe the physics of relativistic collisionless shocks in the laboratory.

10 pages, 3 figures. Accepted to be published on Physical Review Letters on April 23, 2015

References in corpus (2)

• Particle acceleration in relativistic collisionless shocks: Fermi process at last?
• Collisionless Weibel shocks: full formation mechanism and timing

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Charged particle motion and radiation in strong electromagnetic fields
• Scaling laws for positron production in laser--electron-beam collisions
• Order of magnitude increase in laser-target coupling at near-relativistic intensities using compound parabolic concentrators
• Laboratory realization of relativistic pair-plasma beams
• Corrugation of relativistic magnetized shock waves
• Confinement of relativistic electrons in a magnetic mirror en route to a magnetized relativistic pair plasma
• Laser-driven lepton polarization in the quantum radiation-dominated reflection regime
• Dispersion Calibration for the National Ignition Facility Electron Positron Proton Spectrometers for Intense Laser Matter Interactions
• Injection of Positrons into a Dense Electron Cloud in a Magnetic Dipole Trap
• Simulations of Astrophysically Relevant Pair Beam Instabilities in a Laboratory Context
• Broadband coherent XUV light from $e^{-}/e^{+}$ microbunching in an intense laser pulse
• Highly efficient conversion of laser energy to hard X-rays in high intensity laser-solid simulations