Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Coulomb-Field-Induced Conversion Of A High-Energy Photon Into A Pair Assisted By A Counterpropagating Laser Beam, Erik Lotstedt, Ulrich D. Jentschura, Christoph H. Keitel

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

The laser-induced modification of a fundamental process of quantum electrodynamics, the conversion of a high-energy gamma photon in the Coulomb field of a nucleus into an electron-positron pair, is studied theoretically. Although the employed formalism allows for the general case where the gamma photon and laser photons cross at an arbitrary angle, we here focus on a theoretically interesting and numerically challenging setup, where the laser beam and gamma photon counterpropagate and impinge on a nucleus at rest. For a peak laser field smaller than the critical Schwinger field and gamma photon energy larger than the field-free threshold, the total …