Compton photons at the GeV scale from self-aligned collisions with a plasma mirror
Abstract
With today's multi-petawatt lasers, testing quantum electrodynamics (QED) in the strong field regime, where the electric field exceeds the Schwinger critical field in the rest frame of an electron, becomes within reach. Inverse Compton scattering of an intense laser pulse off a high-energy electron beam is the mainstream approach, resulting in the emission of high-energy photons that can decay into Breit-Wheeler electron-positron pairs. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that very high energy photons can be generated in a self-aligned single-laser Compton scattering setup, combining a laser-plasma accelerator and a plasma mirror. Reaching up to the GeV scale, photon emission via nonlinear Compton scattering exhibits a nonclassical scaling in the experiment that is consistent with electric fields reaching up to a fraction of the Schwinger field in the electron rest frame. These foolproof collisions guaranteed by automatic laser-electron overlap provide a new approach for precise investigations of strong-field QED processes.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2412.19337,
title = {Compton photons at the GeV scale from self-aligned collisions with a plasma mirror},
author = {Aimé Matheron and Jean-Raphaël Marquès and Vincent Lelasseux and Yinren Shou and Igor A. Andriyash and Vanessa Ling Jen Phung and Yohann Ayoul and Audrey Beluze and Ioan Dăncuş and Fabien Dorchies and Flanish D'Souza and Mathieu Dumergue and Mickaël Frotin and Julien Gautier and Fabrice Gobert and Marius Gugiu and Santhosh Krishnamurthy and Ivan Kargapolov and Eyal Kroupp and Livia Lancia and Alexandru Lazăr and Adrien Leblanc and Mohamed Lo and Damien Mataja and François Mathieu and Dimitrios Papadopoulos and Pablo San Miguel Claveria and Kim Ta Phuoc and Anda-Maria Talposi and Sheroy Tata and Călin A. Ur and Daniel Ursescu and Lidia Văsescu and Domenico Doria and Victor Malka and Petru Ghenuche and Sebastien Corde},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.19337},
year = {2024}
}