Nonlinear trident in the high-energy limit: Nonlocality, Coulomb field and resummations


Abstract in English

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.

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