Particle-beam scattering from strong-field QED

Abstract

We consider the scattering of probe particles on an ultra-boosted beam of charge, in the case that the fields of the beam are strong and must be treated non-perturbatively. We show that the fields of the ultra-boosted beam act as stochastic plane waves - scattering amplitudes (of elastic scattering, nonlinear Compton and nonlinear Breit-Wheeler) are obtained without approximation by averaging plane wave scattering amplitudes over all possible plane wave parameters. The relevant plane waves are ultra-short and, as such, scattering on ultra-boosted beams does not exhibit the conjectured strong-field behaviour of QED based on the locally constant field approximation.

14 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (8)

• The Color Glass Condensate
• Testing numerical implementations of strong field electrodynamics
• Note on the conjectured breakdown of QED perturbation theory in strong fields
• High energy scattering in gravity and supergravity
• Exact classical and quantum dynamics in background electromagnetic fields
• Rescattering corrections and self-consistent metric in Planckian scattering
• Coherent quantum enhancement of pair production in the null domain
• N-photon amplitudes in a plane-wave background