Energy enhancement of laser-driven ions by radiation reaction and Breit-Wheeler pair production in the ultra-relativistic transparency regime

Abstract

The impact of radiation reaction and Breit-Wheeler pair production on acceleration of fully ionized Carbon ions driven by an intense linearly-polarized laser pulse has been investigated in the ultra-relativistic transparency regime. Against initial expectations radiation reaction and pair production at ultra-high laser intensities is found to enhance the energy gained by the ions. The electrons lose most of their transverse momentum and the additionally produced pair plasma of Breit-Wheeler electrons and positrons co-stream in the forward direction as opposed to the existing electrons streaming at an angle above zero. We discuss how these observations could be explained by the changes in the phase velocity of the Buneman instability, that is known to aid ion acceleration in the Breakout-Afterburner regime, by tapping the free energy in the relative electron and ion streams. We present evidence that these non-classical effects can further improve the highest Carbon ion energies in this transparency regime.

References in corpus (18)

• Ion acceleration by superintense laser-plasma interaction
• Radiation Pressure Dominate Regime of Relativistic Ion Acceleration
• SMILEI: a collaborative, open-source, multi-purpose particle-in-cell code for plasma simulation
• Radiation Pressure Acceleration of Ion Beams Driven by Circularly Polarized Laser Pulses
• Modelling Gamma Ray Emission and Pair Production in High-Intensity Laser-Matter Interactions
• Radiation Reaction Effects on Radiation Pressure Acceleration
• Monte Carlo calculations of pair production in high-intensity laser-plasma interactions
• Pair production in counter-propagating laser beams
• Stochasticity effects in quantum radiation reaction
• Radiation Reaction Effects on Electron Nonlinear Dynamics and Ion Acceleration in Laser-solid Interaction
• Radiation pressure dominant acceleration: polarization and radiation reaction effects, and energy increase in three-dimensional simulations
• Radiation Pressure Acceleration: the factors limiting maximum attainable ion energy
• Efficient ion acceleration and dense electron-positron plasma creation in ultra-high intensity laser-solid interactions
• Vacuum laser acceleration of super-ponderomotive electrons using relativistic transparency injection
• Pair plasma cushions in the hole-boring scenario
• Mapping the power-law decay of high-harmonic spectra from laser-plasma interactions
• Imprint of the stochastic nature of photon emission by electrons on the proton energy spectra in the laser-plasma interaction
• Collisionless shock acceleration of quasi-monoenergetic ions in ultra-relativistic regime