Spin and polarization effects on the nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production in laser-plasma interaction

Huai Hang Song, Wei Min Wang*, Yan Fei Li, Bing Jun Li, Yu Tong Li, Zheng Ming Sheng, Li Ming Chen, Jie Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)
17 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The spin effect of electrons/positrons (e -/e +) and polarization effect of γ photons are investigated in the interaction of two counter-propagating linearly polarized laser pulses of peak intensity 8.9 1023 W cm-2 with a thin foil target. The processes of nonlinear Compton scattering and nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production based on the spin- and polarization-resolved probabilities are implemented into the particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm by Monte Carlo methods. It is found from PIC simulations that the average degree of linear polarization of emitted γ photons can exceed 50%. This polarization effect leads to a reduced positron yield by about 10%. At some medium positron energies, the reduction can reach 20%. Furthermore, we also observe that the local spin polarization of e -/e + leads to a slight decrease of the positron yield about 2% and some anomalous phenomena about the positron spectrum and photon polarization at the high-energy range, due to spin-dependent photon emissions. Our results indicate that spin and polarization effects should be considered in calculating the pair production and laser-plasma interaction with the laser power of 10 PW to 100 PW classes.

Original languageEnglish
Article number075005
Number of pages12
JournalNew Journal of Physics
Volume23
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Jul 2021

Funding

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the . Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences XDA25010300 XDA25050300 XDB16010200 Science Challenge Project of China TZ2016005 TZ2018005 the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the Research Funds of Renmin University of China 20XNLG01 National Natural Science Foundation of China https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001809 11721091 11775302 11991073 12075187 National Key R&D Program of China 2018YFA0404801 yes � 2021 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of the Institute of Physics and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence

Keywords

  • laser-plasma interaction
  • pair production
  • particle-in-cell simulation
  • spin and polarization effects
  • strong-field QED

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