English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler Pair Production in a Tightly Focused Laser Beam

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons30413

Di Piazza,  Antonino
Division Prof. Dr. Christoph H. Keitel, MPI for Nuclear Physics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

1608.08120
(Preprint), 430KB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Di Piazza, A. (2016). Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler Pair Production in a Tightly Focused Laser Beam. Physical Review Letters, 117(21): 213201. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.213201.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002D-3FBF-2
Abstract
The only available analytical framework for investigating QED processes in a strong laser field systematically relies on approximating the latter as a plane wave. However, realistic high-intensity laser beams feature much more complex space-time structures than plane waves. Here, we show the feasibility of an analytical framework for investigating strong-field QED processes in laser beams of arbitrary space-time structure by determining the energy spectrum of positrons produced via nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production as a function of the background field in the realistic assumption that the energy of the incoming photon is the largest dynamical energy in the problem. A numerical evaluation of the angular resolved positron spectrum shows significant quantitative differences with respect to the analogous result in a plane wave, such that the present results will be also important for the design of upcoming strong laser facilities aiming at measuring this process.