Self-absorption of synchrotron radiation in a laser-irradiated plasma

Abstract

Electrons at the surface of a plasma that is irradiated by a laser with intensity in excess of $10^{23}\mathrm{W}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-2}$ are accelerated so strongly that they emit bursts of synchrotron radiation. Although the combination of high photon and electron density and electromagnetic field strength at the plasma surface makes particle-particle interactions possible, these interactions are usually neglected in simulations of the high-intensity regime. Here we demonstrate an implementation of two such processes: photon absorption and stimulated emission. We show that, for plasmas that are opaque to the laser light, photon absorption would cause complete depletion of the multi-keV region of the synchrotron photon spectrum, unless compensated by stimulated emission. Our results motivate further study of the density dependence of QED phenomena in strong electromagnetic fields.

arXiv comment20 pages, 4 figures; accepted version

References in corpus (22)

• The Physics of Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems
• Nonlinear collective effects in photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions
• Physics of Strongly Magnetized Neutron Stars
• Dense Electron-Positron Plasmas and Ultra-Intense Bursts of Gamma-Rays from Laser-Irradiated Solids
• Modelling Gamma Ray Emission and Pair Production in High-Intensity Laser-Matter Interactions
• Extended PIC schemes for physics in ultra-strong laser fields: review and developments
• Highly-efficient source of collimated multi-MeV photons driven by radiation reaction of an electron beam in a self-generated magnetic field
• Implementing nonlinear Compton scattering beyond the local constant field approximation
• Synchrotron Self Absorption in GRB Afterglow
• An extended locally constant field approximation for nonlinear Compton scattering
• Testing numerical implementations of strong field electrodynamics
• Quantum radiation reaction: from interference to incoherence
• Benchmarking semiclassical approaches to strong-field QED: nonlinear Compton scattering in intense laser pulses
• A uniform locally constant field approximation for photon-seeded pair production
• Laser-driven hole boring and gamma-ray emission in high-density plasmas
• Radiation beaming in the quantum regime
• Synchrotron self absorption and the minimum energy of optically thick radio flares from stellar mass black holes
• Compton scattering in particle-in-cell codes
• Absorption cross section in an intense plane wave background
• One-photon pair-annihilation in pulsed plane-wave backgrounds
• Self-absorption of synchrotron radiation in a laser-irradiated plasma

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Polarized QED cascades
• Nonlinear photon trident versus double Compton scattering and resummation of one-step terms
• Self-absorption of synchrotron radiation in a laser-irradiated plasma
• Dominance of $\gamma$-$\gamma$ electron-positron pair creation in a plasma driven by high-intensity lasers