Light-Matter Interaction Near the Schwinger Limit Using Tightly Focused Doppler-Boosted Lasers

30 Mar 2023  ·  Neïl Zaïm, Antonin Sainte-Marie, Luca Fedeli, Pierre Bartoli, Axel Huebl, Jean-Luc Vay, Henri Vincenti ·

The Schwinger limit could be approached by focusing to its diffraction limit the light reflected by a plasma mirror irradiated by a multi-petawatt laser. We explore numerically the interaction between such intense light and matter. We find that the interaction with a relativistic counterpropagative electron beam would enable the exploration of the fully nonperturbative regime of strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SF-QED), while the interaction with an initially solid target leads to a profusion of SF-QED effects that retroact on the laser-plasma interaction. We observe in both scenarios the formation of relativistic attosecond electron-positron jets with very high densities.

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