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.

20 pages, 4 figures; accepted version

References in corpus (6)

• Nonlinear collective effects in photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions
• Physics of Strongly Magnetized Neutron Stars
• Testing numerical implementations of strong field electrodynamics
• Laser-driven hole boring and gamma-ray emission in high-density plasmas
• Compton scattering in particle-in-cell codes
• 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