No Arabic abstract
We study nonlinear trident in laser pulses in the high-energy limit, where the initial electron experiences, in its rest frame, an electromagnetic field strength above Schwingers critical field. At lower energies the dominant contribution comes from the two-step part, but in the high-energy limit the dominant contribution comes instead from the one-step term. We obtain new approximations that explain the relation between the high-energy limit of trident and pair production by a Coulomb field, as well as the role of the Weizsacker-Williams approximation and why it does not agree with the high-$chi$ limit of the locally-constant-field approximation. We also show that the next-to-leading order in the large-$a_0$ expansion is, in the high-energy limit, nonlocal and is numerically very important even for quite large $a_0$. We show that the small-$a_0$ perturbation series has a finite radius of convergence, but using Pade-conformal methods we obtain resummations that go beyond the radius of convergence and have a large numerical overlap with the large-$a_0$ approximation. We use Borel-Pade-conformal methods to resum the small-$chi$ expansion and obtain a high precision up to very large $chi$. We also use newer resummation methods based on hypergeometric/Meijer-G and confluent hypergeometric functions.
We present an effective action for the electroweak sector of the Standard Model valid for the calculation of scattering amplitudes in the high energy (Regge) limit. Gauge invariant Wilson lines are introduced to describe reggeized degrees of freedom whose interactions are generated by effective emission vertices. From this approach previous results at leading logarithmic accuracy for electroweak boson Regge trajectories are reproduced together with the corresponding interaction kernels. The proposed framework lays the path for calculations at higher orders in perturbation theory.
We isolate the two-step mechanism involving a real intermediate photon from the one-step mechanism involving a virtual photon for the trident process in a constant crossed field. The two-step process is shown to agree with an integration over polarised sub-processes. At low to moderate quantum non-linearity parameter, the one-step process is found to be suppressed. When the parameter is large, the two decay channels are comparable if the field dimensions are not much greater than the formation length.
We analyse the high-energy limit of the gluon-gluon scattering amplitude in QCD, and display an intriguing relation between the finite parts of the one-loop gluon impact factor and the finite parts of the two-loop Regge trajectory.
We study the photon trident process, where an initial photon turns into an electron-positron pair and a final photon under a nonlinear interaction with a strong plane-wave background field. We show that this process is very similar to double Compton scattering, where an electron interacts with the background field and emits two photons. We also show how the one-step terms can be obtained by resumming the small- and large-$chi$ expansions. We consider a couple of different resummation methods, and also propose new resummations (involving Meijer-G functions) which have the correct type of expansions at both small and large $chi$. These new resummations require relatively few terms to give good precision.
We study the trident process in laser pulses. We provide exact numerical results for all contributions, including the difficult exchange term. We show that all terms are in general important for a short pulse. For a long pulse we identify a term that gives the dominant contribution even if the intensity is only moderately high, $a_0gtrsim1$, which is an experimentally important regime where the standard locally-constant-field (LCF) approximation cannot be used. We show that the spectrum has a richer structure at $a_0sim1$, compared to the LCF regime $a_0gg1$. We study the convergence to LCF as $a_0$ increases and how this convergence depends on the momentum of the initial electron. We also identify the terms that dominate at high energy.