Focussing effects in laser-electron Thomson scattering

Abstract

We study the effects of laser pulse focussing on the spectral properties of Thomson scattered radiation. Modelling the laser as a paraxial beam we find that, in all but the most extreme cases of focussing, the temporal envelope has a much bigger effect on the spectrum than the focussing itself. For the case of ultra-short pulses, where the paraxial model is no longer valid, we adopt a sub-cycle vector beam description of the field. It is found that the emission harmonics are blue shifted and broaden out in frequency space as the pulse becomes shorter. Additionally the carrier envelope phase becomes important, resulting in an angular asymmetry in the spectrum. We then use the same model to study the effects of focussing beyond the limit where the paraxial expansion is valid. It is found that fields focussed to sub-wavelength spot sizes produce spectra that are qualitatively similar to those from sub-cycle pulses due to the shortening of the pulse with focussing. Finally, we study high-intensity fields and find that, in general, the focussing makes negligible difference to the spectra in the regime of radiation reaction.

arXiv comment14 pages, 17 figures

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Experimental evidence of radiation reaction in the collision of a high-intensity laser pulse with a laser-wakefield accelerated electron beam
• Radiation reaction in electron-beam interactions with high-intensity lasers
• Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production in a tightly focused laser beam
• Quantum quenching of radiation losses in short laser pulses
• Exact classical and quantum dynamics in background electromagnetic fields
• Strong field QED in lepton colliders and electron/laser interactions
• First-order strong-field QED processes in a tightly focused laser beam
• Optimizing Laser Pulses for Narrowband Inverse Compton Sources in the High-Intensity Regime
• Laser Pulsing in Linear Compton Scattering
• WKB Electron Wave Functions in a Tightly Focused Laser Beam
• Coherent quantum enhancement of pair production in the null domain
• In Situ Characterization of Ultraintense Laser Pulses
• Determining the duration of an intense laser pulse directly in focus
• Optimized computation of tight focusing of short pulses using mapping to periodic space
• Properties of an ultrarelativistic charged particle radiation in a constant homogeneous crossed electromagnetic field
• Effect of electron-beam energy chirp on signatures of radiation reaction in laser-based experiments
• Complete characterization of ultra-intense laser pulses in radiation damping regime