BBGKY kinetic approach for an e-e+gamma plasma created from the vacuum in a strong laser-generated electric field: The one-photon annihilation channel

TL;DR

This paper develops a kinetic model based on the BBGKY hierarchy to describe electron-positron plasma creation and photon production in strong laser fields, highlighting the conditions under which observable gamma-ray photons can be generated.

Contribution

It introduces a truncated kinetic equation framework for vacuum pair creation and photon emission in strong laser fields, focusing on the one-photon annihilation channel under the Markovian approximation.

Findings

Photon production is negligible in the optical region for subcritical fields.

In the gamma-ray region, photon production becomes observable for subcritical fields.

Infrared photon distribution follows a 1/k flicker noise spectrum.

Abstract

In the present work a closed system of kinetic equations is obtained from the truncation of the BBGKY hierarchy for the description of the vacuum creation of an electron - positron plasma and secondary photons due to a strong laser field. This truncation is performed in the Markovian approximation for the one-photon annihilation channel which is accessible due to the presence of the strong external field. Estimates of the photon production rate are obtained for different domains of laser field parameters (frequency nu and field strength E). A huge quantity of optical photons of the quasiclassical laser field is necessary to satisfy the conservation laws of energy and momentum of the constituents (e-, e+, gamma) in this channel. Since the number of these optical photons corresponds to the order of perturbation theory, a vanishingly small photon production rate results for the optical region and strongly subcritical fields E << E_c. In the gamma-ray region nu <~ m the required number of laser photons is small and the production rate of photons from the one-photon annihilation process becomes accessible to observations for subcritical fields E <~ E_c. In the infrared region the photon distribution has a 1/k spectrum typical for flicker noise.