Regular Article

Multi-photon regime of non-linear Breit-Wheeler and Compton processes in short linearly and circularly polarized laser pulses

¹ Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, JINR, Dubna 141980, Russia
² Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, 01314 Dresden, Germany
³ Institut für Theoretische Physik, TU Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany

^a e-mail: atitov@theor.jinr.ru

Received: 25 October 2019
Received in final form: 9 January 2020
Published online: 25 February 2020

Abstract

Non-linear Breit-Wheeler e⁺ e⁻ pair production and its crossing channel – the non-linear Compton process – in the multi-photon regime are analyzed for linearly and circularly polarized short laser pulses. The contribution of multi-photon processes to total cross sections is determined and we also show that (i) the azimuthal angular distributions of outgoing electrons in these processes differ on a qualitative level, and (ii) they depend on the polarization properties of the pulses. A finite carrier envelope phase ϕ_CEP leads to a non-trivial non-monotonic behavior of the azimuthal angle distributions of the considered processes. That effect can be used for the ϕ_CEP determination.