Speaker
Dr
Jason Cole
(Imperial College London)
Description
The dynamics of energetic particles in strong electromagnetic fields can be strongly influenced by radiation reaction, and today's lasers are sufficiently intense to explore the transition between the classical and quantum radiation reaction regimes. Here, we report on the observation of radiation reaction in the collision of an ultra-relativistic electron beam generated by laser wakefield acceleration (E > 500 MeV) with an intense laser pulse (a0 > 10). We measure an energy loss in the post-collision electron spectrum that is correlated with the detected signal of hard photons (gamma-rays), consistent with a quantum (stochastic) description of radiation reaction. The generated gamma-rays have the highest energies yet reported from an all-optical inverse Compton scattering scheme, with characteristic energy > 30 MeV.
Primary author
Dr
Jason Cole
(Imperial College London)
Co-authors
Dr
Alec Thomas
(University of Michigan)
Dr
Anton Ilderton
(University of Plymouth)
Dr
Archis Joglekar
(University of California, Los Angeles)
Mr
Chris Baird
(University of York)
Dr
Christopher Harvey
(Chalmers University of Technology)
Dr
Christopher Murphy
(University of York)
Dr
Christopher Ridgers
(University of York)
Dr
Daniel Symes
(Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)
Mr
Elias Gerstmayr
(Imperial College London)
Dr
Gianluca Sarri
(Queen's University Belfast)
Mr
Guillermo Samarin
(Queens University Belfast)
Mr
Jonathan Warwick
(Queens University Belfast)
Dr
Jonathan Wood
(Imperial College London)
Prof.
Karl Krushelnick
(University of Michigan/Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquee)
Mr
Keegan Behm
(University of Michigan)
Dr
Kristjan Poder
(DESY)
Prof.
Matt Zepf
(Queens University Belfast)
Mr
Matthew Duff
(University of Strathclyde)
Prof.
Mattias Marklund
(Chalmers University of Technology)
Prof.
Paul McKenna
(University of Strathclyde)
Dr
Stefan Kuschel
(Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat)
Dr
Stuart Mangles
(Imperial College London)
Dr
Tom Blackburn
(Chalmers University of Technology)
Prof.
Zulfikar Najmudin
(Imperial College London)
