Laser-driven -ray source via radiation reaction effect

Nakamura, Tatsufumi; Koga, J. K.; Esirkepov, T. Z.; Kando, Masaki; Korn, G.*; Bulanov, S. V.

In the interactions of peta-watt class laser pulses and matters, a radiation reaction effect on an electron motion driven by the strong laser field plays an important role. The effect of radiation reaction is expected to lead to the generation of high flux of photons in the energy range of -rays. In order to evaluate the detail of the -ray characteristics and efficiency, we developed a Particle-in-Cell code incorporating the radiation reaction effect by using Landau-Lifshitz equation. From the numerical analyses, it is found that the generated -ray pulse has quite unique features such as high power, short duration, high directionality, and high conversion efficiency when choosing the optimum conditions. We showed how to control the photon number, photon energy, pulse duration and so on. These studies lead us to propose a new source of laser-driven -rays via radiation reaction effect.