Thomson and Compton scattering with an intense laser pulse

Abstract

Our paper concerns the scattering of intense laser radiation on free electrons and it is focused on the relation between nonlinear Compton and nonlinear Thomson scattering. The analysis is performed for a laser field modeled by an ideal pulse with a finite duration, a fixed direction of propagation and indefinitely extended in the plane perpendicular to it. We derive the classical limit of the quantum spectral and angular distribution of the emitted radiation, for an arbitrary polarization of the laser pulse. We also rederive our result directly, in the framework of classical electrodynamics, obtaining, at the same time, the distribution for the emitted radiation with a well defined polarization. The results reduce to those established by Krafft et al. [G. A. Krafft, A. Doyuran and J. B. Rosenzweig, Phys. Rev. E 72, 056502 (2005)] in the particular case of linear polarization of the pulse, orthogonal to the initial electron momentum. Conditions in which the differences between classical and quantum results are visible are discussed and illustrated by graphs.

Compton process in intense short laser pulses

“…A complementary study for single-cycle laser pulses was presented in [24], whereas the emphasis on a comparison with the nonlinear Thomson scattering (for reviews, see, for instance [26,27]) was put in Refs. [21,23,25]. All these theoretical works follow various related experi-ments.…”

“…However, for intense few-cycle laser pulses which are used nowadays in experimental setups, a more adequate treatment of the temporal structure of an incident laser pulse is necessary. This has been offered in very recent papers [20][21][22][23][24][25] using the approach of Neville and Rohrlich [17].…”

Spectral characteristics of Compton backscattering sources. Linear and nonlinear modes

“…Authors of numerous papers have considered the process of nonlinear scattering of the high intensity laser radiation by relativistic electrons using classical [7][8][9] and quantum [10][11][12][13] approaches.…”

Narrowband inverse Compton scattering x-ray sources at high laser intensities

“…* d.seipt@gsi.de These proposals for compensating the ponderomotive broadening were just based on the classical theory of Thomson scattering that neglects the electron recoil [30,32]. However, there are well-known differences between the spectra of Thomson scattering and Compton scattering due to electron recoil and spin effects [33][34][35][36]. It is, therefore, important to study whether a full compensation of the ponderomotive broadening is still possible when these effects are taken into account.…”