Parametric study of the polarization dependence of nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair creation process using two laser pulses

TL;DR

This study investigates how the polarization of laser pulses affects the nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair creation process in strong-field QED, using simulations of two laser pulses interacting with an ultrarelativistic electron beam.

Contribution

It presents a parametric analysis of polarization effects on pair creation, optimizing laser pulses for high-energy photon generation and pair production in strong-field QED.

Findings

Polarization significantly influences pair creation rates.

Optimized laser pulses enhance photon and pair production efficiency.

The results support experimental verification of polarization-dependent QED processes.

Abstract

With the rapid development of high-power petawatt class lasers worldwide, exploring physics in the strong field QED regime will become one of the frontiers for laser-plasma interactions research. Particle-in-cell codes, including quantum emission processes, are powerful tools for predicting and analyzing future experiments where the physics of relativistic plasma is strongly affected by strong-field QED processes. The spin/polarization dependence of these quantum processes has been of recent interest. In this article, we perform a parametric study of the interaction of two laser pulses with an ultrarelativistic electron beam. The first pulse is optimized to generate high-energy photons by nonlinear Compton scattering and efficiently decelerate the electron beam through quantum radiation reaction. The second pulse is optimized to generate electron-positron pairs by nonlinear Breit-Wheeler decay of the photons with the maximum polarization dependence. This may be experimentally realized as a verification of the strong field QED framework, including the spin/polarization rates.