Speaker
Elias Gerstmayr
Description
See the full Abstract at http://ocs.ciemat.es/EPS2018ABS/pdf/O5.202.pdf
Experimental evidence of radiation reaction effects in the collision of a
high-intensity laser pulse with a laser-wakefield accelerated electron beam
J. M. Cole1, K. T. Behm2, E. Gerstmayr1*, T. G. Blackburn3, J. C. Wood1, C. D. Baird4,
M. J. Duff5, C. Harvey3, A. Ilderton3,6, A. S. Joglekar2,7, K. Krushelnick2, S. Kuschel8,
M. Marklund3, P. McKenna5, C. D. Murphy4, K. Põder1, C. P. Ridgers4, G. M. Samarin9,
G. Sarri9, D. R. Symes10, A. G. R. Thomas2,11, J. Warwick9, M. Zepf8,9,12, Z. Najmudin1,
S. P. D. Mangles1
1
The John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, Imperial College London, London, UK
2
Center for Ultrafast Optical Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
3
Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden
4
York Plasma Institute, Department of Physics, University of York, York, UK
5
SUPA Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
6
Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Plymouth University, UK
7
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA
8
Institut für Optik und Quantenelektronik, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, Germany
9
School of Mathematics and Physics, The Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, UK
10
Central Laser Facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, UK
11
Physics Department, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster, UK
12
Helmholtz Institut Jena, Jena, Germany
*e.gerstmayr15@imperial.ac.uk
We present experimental evidence of radiation reaction in the collision of a highly relativistic
electron beam generated by laser-wakefield acceleration (e > 500 MeV) with an intense laser
pulse (a0 > 10). This was recently published in [1]. We measure the electron and g-ray spectra
from inverse Compton scattering simultaneously to infer the conditions at the point of
interaction independently. The energy loss in the electron spectrum after the collision and the
g-ray signal are correlated, consistent with a quantum description of radiation reaction. The
generated g-ray spectrum reaches a critical energy ecrit > 30 MeV, being the highest g-ray
energy from an all-optical inverse Compton scattering scheme reported so far [2,3,4].
[1] J. M. Cole et al., Physical Review X 8, 011020 (2018)
[2] K. Ta Phuoc et al., Nature Photonics 6, 308 (2012)
[3] N. D. Powers et al., Nature Photonics 8, 28 (2014)
[4] G. Sarri et al., Physical Review Letters 113, 1 (2014)
