Optimal photon polarization toward the observation of the nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production

Abstract

We investigate the optimization of the photon polarization to increase the yield of the Breit-Wheeler pair production in arbitrarily polarized plane wave backgrounds. We show that the optimized photon polarization can improve the positron yield by more than $20\%$ compared to the unpolarized case, in the intensity regime of current laser-particle experiments. The seed photon's optimal polarization is resulting from the polarization coupling with the polarization of the laser pulse. The compact expressions of the coupling coefficients in both the perturbative and nonperturbative regime are given. Because of the evident difference in the coupling coefficients for the linear and circular polarization components, the seed photon's optimal polarization state in an elliptically polarized laser background, deviates considerably from the orthogonal state of the laser polarization.

References in corpus (15)

• Conceptual Design Report for the LUXE Experiment
• Finite size effects in stimulated laser pair production
• Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production in a tightly focused laser beam
• Loops and polarization in strong-field QED
• First-order strong-field QED processes in a tightly focused laser beam
• Analytical tools for investigating strong-field QED processes in tightly focused laser fields
• Electron spin- and photon polarization-resolved probabilities of strong-field QED processes
• Single Particle Detection System for Strong-Field QED Experiments
• Fully polarized nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production in pulsed plane waves
• Strong-Field Breit-Wheeler Pair Production in Two Consecutive Laser Pulses with Variable Time Delay
• WKB Electron Wave Functions in a Tightly Focused Laser Beam
• Coherent quantum enhancement of pair production in the null domain
• Generation of quasi-monoenergetic positron beams in chirped laser fields
• Studies of high-field QED with the LUXE experiment at the European XFEL
• Volkov States and Non-linear Compton Scattering in Short and Intense Laser Pulses

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Locally monochromatic two-step nonlinear trident process in a plane wave
• Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production using polarized photons from inverse Compton scattering