paper

Laser-pulse-shape control of seeded QED cascades

arXiv:1511.03987 · doi:10.1038/s41598-017-05891-z

Abstract

QED cascades are complex avalanche processes of hard photon emission and electron-positron pair creation driven by ultra-strong electromagnetic fields. They play a fundamental role in astrophysical environments such as a pulsars' magnetosphere, rendering an earth-based implementation with intense lasers attractive. In the literature, QED cascades were also predicted to limit the attainable intensity in a set-up of colliding laser beams in a tenuous gas such as the residual gas of a vacuum chamber, therefore severely hindering experiments at extreme field intensities. Here, we demonstrate that the onset of QED cascades may be either prevented even at intensities around $10^{26}\text{ W/cm$^{2}$}$ with tightly focused laser pulses and low- gases, or facilitated at intensities below $10^{24}\text{ W/cm$^{2}$}$ with enlarged laser focal areas or high- gases. These findings pave the way for the control of novel experiments such as the generation of pure electron-positron-photon plasmas from laser energy, and for probing QED in the extreme-intensity regime where the quantum vacuum becomes unstable.

11 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

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