Quasiclassical approach to high-energy QED processes in strong laser and atomic fields

TL;DR

This paper develops a quasiclassical Green's function approach to analyze high-energy QED processes in combined strong laser and atomic fields, revealing significant laser-induced modifications to electron-positron production cross sections.

Contribution

It introduces a novel operator-based method to derive the Dirac Green's function in complex fields, enabling detailed analysis of high-energy QED processes in combined laser and atomic environments.

Findings

Laser fields significantly alter the Bethe-Heitler cross section at accessible energies.

The approach allows observation of Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect analogs in laser fields.

The method provides a new tool for studying QED processes in strong-field regimes.

Abstract

An approach, based on the use of the quasiclassical Green's function, is developed for investigating high-energy quantum electrodynamical processes in combined strong laser and atomic fields. Employing an operator technique, we derive the Green's function of the Dirac equation in an arbitrary plane wave and a localized potential. Then, we calculate the total cross section of high-energy electron-positron photoproduction in an atomic field of arbitrary charge number (Bethe-Heitler process) in the presence of a strong laser field. It is shown that the laser field substantially modifies the cross section at already available incoming photon energies and laser parameters. This makes it feasible to observe the analogous effect in a laser field of the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect for the Bethe-Heitler process.