Attosecond bunches of gamma photons and positrons generated in nanostructure targets.

Lécz, Zs; Andreev, A · Phys Rev E · 2019

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The subatomic experimental exploration of physical processes on extremely short time scales has become possible by the generation of high-quality electron bunches and x-ray pulses with subfemtosecond durations. Increasing the photon energy from the x-ray to gamma-ray regime makes probing of extremely small space-time domains accessible. Here, a mechanism for generating attosecond gamma photon and positron bunches with small divergence using laser intensities below 10^{23}W/cm^{2} is proposed. In contrast with previous works, in our scheme a single laser pulse is sufficient instead of two counterpropagating pulses. Numerical simulations are used to formulate the conditions for confined radiation and to characterize the generated photon and positron bunches.