Laser-pulse-shape control of seeded QED cascades.

ABSTRACT: QED cascades are complex avalanche processes of hard photon emission and electron-positron pair creation driven by ultrastrong electromagnetic fields. They play a fundamental role in astrophysical environments such as a pulsars' magnetosphere, rendering an earth-based implementation with intense lasers attractive. In the literature, QED cascades were also predicted to limit the attainable intensity in a set-up of colliding laser beams in a tenuous gas such as the residual gas of a vacuum chamber, therefore severely hindering experiments at extreme field intensities. Here, we demonstrate that the onset of QED cascades may be either prevented even at intensities around 10²⁶ W/cm² with tightly focused laser pulses and low-Z gases, or facilitated at intensities below 10

SUBMITTER: Tamburini M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5516046 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature