Related papers: On the upper limit of laser intensity attainable i…
In very intense electromagnetic fields, the vacuum refractive index is expected to be modified due to nonlinear quantum electrodynamics (QED) properties. Several experimental tests using high intensity lasers have been proposed to observe…
We consider the acceleration of electrons in vacuum by means of the circularly-polirized electromagnetic wave, propagating along a magnetic field. We show that the electron energy growth, when using ultra-short and ultra-intense laser…
Intense lasers can accelerate electrons to very high energy over a short distance. Such compact accelerators have several potential applications including fast ignition, high energy physics, and radiography. Among the various schemes of…
A quantum fluid model is used to describe the interacion of a nondegenerate cold relativistic electron beam with an intense optical wiggler taking into account the beam space-charge potential and photon recoil effect. A nonlinear set of…
Today's high-intensity laser facilities produce short pulses can, in tight focus, reach peak intensities of $10^{22}\,\mathrm{Wcm}^{-2}$ and, in long focus, wakefield-accelerate electrons to GeV energies. The radiation-reaction--dominated…
Two scenarios for the penetration of relativistically intense laser radiation into an overdense plasma, accessible by self-induced transparency, are presented. For supercritical densities less than 1.5 times the critical one, penetration of…
In simulations of a 10PW laser striking a solid we demonstrate the possibility of producing a pure electron-positron plasma by the same processes as those thought to operate in high-energy astrophysical environments. A maximum positron…
Ultrahigh-intensity lasers (10$^{18}$-10$^{22}$W/cm$^{2}$) have opened up new perspectives in many fields of research and application [1-5]. By irradiating a thin foil, an ultrahigh accelerating field (10$^{12}$ V/m) can be formed and…
The possibility to observe vacuum electron-positron pair creation due to a powerful optical laser pulse is discussed. We employ a quantum kinetic formulation of the problem with a source term describing the vacuum pair production in a…
It is a long-standing non-trivial prediction of quantum electrodynamics that its vacuum is unstable in the background of a static, spatially uniform electric field and, in principle, sparks with spontaneous emission of electron-positron…
We study the possibility to enhance the phase space density of non-interacting particles submitted to a classical laser field without spontaneous emission. We clearly state that, when no spontaneous emission is present, a quantum…
Laser-driven ions have compelling properties and their potential use for medical applications has attracted a huge global interest. One of the major challenges of these applications is generating beams of the required energies. To date,…
We show that extreme vacuum pressures can be measured with current technology by detecting the photons produced by the relativistic Thomson scattering of ultra-intense laser light by the electrons of the medium. We compute the amount of…
With the best of modern standard lasers, high-energy $\gamma\gamma$ colliders from electron beams of E larger than 250 GeV are only possible at the expense of photon luminosity, i.e. 10 times lower than for photon colliders at c.m. energies…
In this letter, cutting-edge 3D Particle-In-Cell simulations are used to demonstrate that so-called relativistic plasma mirrors irradiated by PetaWatt (PW) lasers and naturally curved by laser radiation pressure can be used to tightly focus…
A method to generate ultrahigh intense electromagnetic fields is suggested, based on the laser pulse compression, carrier frequency upshift and focusing by a counter-propagating breaking plasma wave, relativistic flying parabolic mirror.…
The subject of this paper is the scattering of a very intense laser pulse (intensity $I\sim10^{21}\;{\mathrm{W/cm^2}}$) on relativistic electrons with Lorentz factor between 10 and 45. The laser pulse is modeled by a plane wave with finite…
Laser wakefield accelerators rely on the extremely high electric fields of nonlinear plasma waves to trap and accelerate electrons to relativistic energies over short distances. When driven strongly enough, plasma waves break, trapping a…
When studying the interaction of matter with extreme fields using multipetawatt lasers, there are two limiting cases maximizing either the electric field or the magnetic field. Here, the main attention is paid to the optimal configuration…
This article presents: 1) The theoretical background of strong field physics and vacuum structure and stability; 2) The instrumental developments in the area of pulse lasers and considers the physics case for ultra intense laser facilities;…