Related papers: Pair Production Detectors for Gamma-ray Astrophysi…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a key mission in multiwavelength and multimessenger studies, has been surveying the gamma-ray sky from its low-Earth orbit since 2008. Its two scientific instruments, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM)…
The measurements of electrons from cosmic rays have begun a new era a few years ago with high precision experiments like PAMELA and Fermi-LAT. The positron fraction seems to indicate an unknown component above the standard background…
Production of particle-antiparticle pairs by a high-energy probe photon propagating through a high-intensity laser field is considered in the nonperturbative interaction regime. The laser field consists of a strong low-frequency and a weak…
Electron-positron pairs may be produced near accreting black holes by a variety of physical processes, and the resulting pair plasma may be accelerated and collimated into a relativistic jet. Here we use a self-consistent dynamical and…
We describe a high efficiency detector for measuring electron-positron pair transitions in nuclei. The device was built to be insensitive to gamma rays and to accommodate high overall event rates. The design was optimized for total pair…
High-energy gamma rays are a valuable tool for studying particle acceleration and radiation in the magnetospheres of energetic pulsars. The six or more pulsars seen by CGRO/EGRET show that: the light curves usually have double-peak…
High-energy photons are a powerful probe for astrophysics and for fundamental physics under extreme conditions. During the recent years, our knowledge of the most violent phenomena in the Universe has impressively progressed thanks to the…
The transformation of electromagnetic energy into matter represents a fascinating prediction of relativistic quantum electrodynamics that is paradigmatically exemplified by the creation of electron-positron pairs out of light. However, this…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was launched more than 13 years ago and since then it has dramatically changed our knowledge of the gamma-ray sky. With more than three billions photons from the whole sky, collected in the energy range…
A year after \emph{Fermi} was launched, the number of known gamma-ray pulsars has increased dramatically. For the first time, a sizable population of pulsars has been discovered in gamma-ray data alone. For the first time, millisecond…
High-energy gamma rays are a valuable tool for studying particle acceleration and radiation in the magnetospheres of energetic pulsars. The seven or more pulsars seen by instruments on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) show that: the…
Microquasars, X-ray binary systems that generate relativistic jets, were discovered in our Galaxy in the last decade of the XXth century. Their name indicates that they are manifestations of the same physics as quasars but on a completely…
Recent results, the present status and the perspectives of high energy gamma-ray astronomy are described. Since the satellite observations by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and its precursor missions have been reviewed extensively,…
The Large Area Telescope (LAT), one of two instruments on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is a pair-conversion detector designed to study the gamma-ray sky in the energy range 30 MeV to 300 GeV. Fermi has detected high-energy gamma rays…
We present recipes to diagnose the fireball of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) by combining observations of electron-positron pair-signatures (the pair-annihilation line and the cutoff energy due to the pair-creation process). Our recipes are…
Gamma-ray and electron-positron pair production will figure prominently in laser-plasma experiments with next generation lasers. Using a Monte Carlo approach we show that straggling effects arising from the finite recoil an electron…
We give an exact, analytic, and manifestly gauge invariant account of pair production in combined longitudinal and transverse electromagnetic fields, both depending arbitrarily on lightfront time. The instantaneous, nonperturbative…
We examine the performance of a TPC as a gamma-ray telescope above the pair-creation threshold. The contributions to the photon angular resolution are studied and their dependence on energy is obtained. The effective area per detector unit…
The Large Area Telescope on the recently launched Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly GLAST), with its large field of view and effective area, combined with its excellent timing capabilities, is poised to revolutionize the field of…
The Earth's high energy gamma-ray emission is caused by cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere. The EGRET detector on-board the CGRO satellite is only the second experiment (after SAS-2) to provide a suitable dataset for the…