Optimal photon polarization toward the observation of the nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that optimizing photon polarization can significantly enhance Breit-Wheeler pair production yields in laser experiments, with over 20% improvement, by analyzing polarization coupling effects.

Contribution

It introduces a method to optimize photon polarization for increased pair production, providing compact expressions for coupling coefficients in different regimes.

Findings

Optimized photon polarization increases positron yield by over 20%.

The optimal polarization depends on laser polarization and coupling coefficients.

Significant deviation from orthogonal polarization in elliptical backgrounds.

Abstract

We investigate the optimization of the photon polarization to increase the yield of the Breit-Wheeler pair production in arbitrarily polarized plane wave backgrounds. We show that the optimized photon polarization can improve the positron yield by more than $20\%$ compared to the unpolarized case, in the intensity regime of current laser-particle experiments. The seed photon's optimal polarization is resulting from the polarization coupling with the polarization of the laser pulse. The compact expressions of the coupling coefficients in both the perturbative and nonperturbative regime are given. Because of the evident difference in the coupling coefficients for the linear and circular polarization components, the seed photon's optimal polarization state in an elliptically polarized laser background, deviates considerably from the orthogonal state of the laser polarization.