Abstract
Light–matter interactions driven by ultrahigh-intensity lasers have great potential to uncover the physics associated with quantum electrodynamics (QED) processes occurring in neutron stars and black holes. The Compton scattering between an ultra-relativistic electron beam and an intense laser can reveal a new interaction regime, known as strong-field QED. Here we present an experimental demonstration of nonlinear Compton scattering in a strong laser field, in which a laser-accelerated multi-gigaelectronvolt electron scatters off hundreds of laser photons and converts them into a single gamma-ray photon with several-hundred-megaelectronvolt energy. Along with particle-in-cell (PIC)-QED simulations and analytical calculations, our experimental measurement of gamma-ray spectra verifies the occurrence of Compton scattering in the strongly nonlinear regime, paving the road to examine nonlinear Breit–Wheeler pair production and QED cascades.
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All data used for this study are available in the Article and its Supplementary Information. Any additional information can be obtained from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the skilful petawatt laser operation and target area management by the CoReLS technical staff. Some of the computational works for this research were performed on the IBS Supercomputer, Aleph, in the IBS Research Solution Center. We acknowledge PRACE for granting access to MareNostrum in BSC, Spain. This work was supported primarily by the Institute for Basic Science under IBS-R012-D1. Additional support was provided by the UQBF operation programme (140011) of APRI/GIST and Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) grants nos. CEECIND/01906/2018, PTDC/FIS-PLA/3800/2021 and FCT/UI/BD/153735/2022.
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C.H.N. and J.H.S. conceived the project. M.M., C.I.H., D.Y.K., T.G.P., H.W.L., J.W.Y., S.K.L., Y.J.R. and J.H.S. performed experiments and data collection. M.M., C.I.H., D.Y.K., C.M.K., Y.J.R., K.Y.K. and C.H.N. analysed experimental data. V.B.P., M.V. and Ó.A. carried out simulations and analytical calculations. M.M., C.I.H., V.B.P., C.M.K., M.V., K.Y.K., J.H.S. and C.H.N. wrote the paper, which was reviewed by all authors.
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Mirzaie, M., Hojbota, C.I., Kim, D.Y. et al. All-optical nonlinear Compton scattering performed with a multi-petawatt laser. Nat. Photon. 18, 1212–1217 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-024-01550-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-024-01550-8
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