Quantum radiation in ultra-intense laser pulses : doctoral thesis accepted by Ruperto-Carola University of Heidelberg, Germany

Scientific advances and several technical breakthroughs have led to a remarkable increase in available laser intensities over the past decades. In available ultra-intense laser fields, photon fluxes may become so high that free charge carriers interact coherently with several of the field's photons. In this thesis such nonlinear interactions are investigated for the prime example of radiation emission by electrons scattered from intense laser pulses of arbitrary temporal structure. To this end, nonlinear quantum field theory is employed taking the interaction with the laser into account exactly. After an in-depth introduction to classical particle dynamics as well as quantum field theory in nonlinearly intense laser fields the emission of one and two photons is explicitly analyzed. The results are then translated to viable technical applications, such as a scheme for the determination of the carrier-envelope phase of ultra-intense laser pulses and a proposal for detecting the strongly suppressed two-photon signal. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction....Pages 1-20 Interaction of Electrons with Laser Fields....Pages 21-57 Nonlinear Single Compton Scattering....Pages 59-98 Nonlinear Double Compton Scattering....Pages 99-129 Numerical Integration of Strongly Oscillating Functions....Pages 131-139 Summary and Outlook....Pages 141-144 Back Matter....Pages 145-175