Linear Breit-Wheeler pair production by high-energy bremsstrahlung photons colliding with an intense X-ray laser pulse

Abstract

A possible setup for the experimental verification of linear Breit-Wheeler pair creation of electrons and positrons in photon-photon collisions is studied theoretically. It combines highly energetic bremsstrahlung photons, which are assumed to be generated by an incident beam of GeV electrons penetrating through a high-$Z$ target, with keV photons from an X-ray laser field, which is described as a focused Gaussian pulse. We discuss the dependencies of the pair yields on the incident electron energy, target thickness, laser parameters, and collision geometry. It is shown that, for suitable conditions which are nowadays in reach at X-ray laser facilities, the resulting number of created particles seems to be well accessible for enabling the first experimental observation of the linear Breit-Wheeler process $\gamma \gamma \to e^{+}{e}^{-}$.

8 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Non-linear Breit-Wheeler pair production in collisions of bremsstrahlung $\gamma -$quanta and a tightly focussed laser pulse
• A laser-plasma platform for photon-photon physics
• Angle-dependent pair production in the polarized two-photon Breit-Wheeler process
• Strong-field Breit-Wheeler pair production with bremsstrahlung gamma-rays in the perturbative-to-nonperturbative transition regime
• Strong-field Breit-Wheeler pair production in ${\mathrm{QED}}_{2+1}$
• Signatures of linear Breit-Wheeler pair production in polarized $\gamma \gamma$ collisions
• Electron-positron pair production in the collision of real photon beams with wide energy distributions