Relativistic three-body recombination with the QED vacuum
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2015-05-28 v1 Atomic Physics
Plasma Physics
Abstract
Electron-positron pair annihilation into a single photon is studied when a second free electron is present. Focussing on the relativistic regime, we show that the photon emitted in the three-lepton interaction may exhibit distinct angular distributions and polarization properties. Moreover, the process can dominate over two-photon annihilation in relativistic electron-positron plasmas of few-MeV temperature. An analogy with three-body recombination of electrons with ions is drawn.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1105.0279,
title = {Relativistic three-body recombination with the QED vacuum},
author = {Huayu Hu and Carsten Müller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.0279},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures