Helicity transfer in strong laser fields via the electron anomalous magnetic moment

Abstract

Electron beam longitudinal polarization during the interaction with counterpropagating circularly-polarized ultraintense laser pulses is investigated, while accounting for the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. Although it is known that the helicity transfer from the laser photons to the electron beam is suppressed in linear and nonlinear Compton scattering processes, we show that the helicity transfer nevertheless can happen via an intermediate step of the electron radiative transverse polarization, phase-matched with the driving field, followed up by spin rotation into the longitudinal direction as induced by the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. With spin-resolved QED Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate the consequent helicity transfer from laser photons to the electron beam with a degree up to 10%, along with an electron radial polarization up to 65% after multiple photon emissions in a femtosecond timescale. This effect is detectable with currently achievable laser facilities, evidencing the role of the leading QED vertex correction to the electron anomalous magnetic moment in the polarization dynamics in ultrastrong laser fields.

References in corpus (6)

• Measurement of the Positive Muon Anomalous Magnetic Moment to 0.46 ppm
• QED cascades induced by circularly polarized laser fields
• Ultrarelativistic electron beam polarization in single-shot interaction with an ultraintense laser pulse
• Testing strong-field QED close to the fully non-perturbative regime using aligned crystals
• Numerical approach to the semiclassical method of radiation emission for arbitrary electron spin and photon polarization
• Radiative polarization dynamics of relativistic electrons in an intense electromagnetic field

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Spin-polarized electron beam generation in the colliding-pulse injection scheme
• Strong signature of one-loop self-energy in polarization resolved nonlinear Compton scattering
• Colliding Pulse Injection of Polarized Electron Bunches in a Laser-Plasma Accelerator
• Laser-driven lepton polarization in the quantum radiation-dominated reflection regime
• Pair Production in Circularly Polarized Waves
• On the helicity of radiative electromagnetic fields
• Intrinsic Nonlocality of Spin- and Polarization-Resolved Probabilities in Strong-Field Quantum Electrodynamics