Compton process in intense short laser pulses

Abstract

The spectra of Compton radiation emitted during electron scattering off an intense laser beam are calculated using the framework of strong-field quantum electrodynamics. We model these intense laser beams as finite length plane-wave-fronted pulses, similar to Neville and Rohrlich [Phys. Rev. D 3, 1692 (1971)], or as trains of such pulses. Expressions for energy and angular distributions of Compton photons are derived such that a comparison of both situations becomes meaningful. Comparing frequency distributions for both an isolated laser pulse and a laser pulse train, we find a very good agreement between the results for long pulse durations which breaks down however for ultrashort laser pulses. The dependence of angular distributions of emitted radiation on a pulse duration is also investigated. Pronounced asymmetries of angular distributions are found for very short laser pulses, which gradually disappear with increasing the number of laser field oscillations. Those asymmetries are attributed to asymmetries of the vector potential describing an incident laser beam.

Supercontinuum and ultrashort-pulse generation from nonlinear Thomson and Compton scattering

“…[15]. It follows from there that the frequency-angular distribution of radiated Compton energy (Eqs.…”

“…(47) in Ref. [15]). We shall call the complex function A C,σ (ω K , λ i , λ f ) the Compton amplitude; it is worth noting that it also depends on the remaining parameters of the Compton scattering, but we display explicitly only those which are essential for our further discussion.…”

“…For details of the quantum and classical formulation regarding each process we refer the reader to Refs. [15,17,18] and [18,[34][35][36][37][38], respectively. Since the nonlinear Compton scattering is a direct generalization of the nonlinear Thomson scattering into the quantum domain, we shall compile theory for these two processes such that the corresponding formulas are as similar as possible.…”

“…For the convenience of the reader, in Sec. II, we repeat the theoretical formulation of Thomson and Compton scattering as introduced in our previous papers [15,18]. In Sec.…”

“…Thus, it is physically justified to describe the driving field as a pulsed plane wave [7]. This approach has been used recently in connection to not only Thomson and Compton scattering [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], but also to other strong-field processes such as * E-mail address: Katarzyna.Krajewska@fuw.edu.pl…”