ExHILP 2025

Compton photons at the GeV scale from self-aligned collisions with a plasma mirror : Overview of the ELI-NP and APOLLON campaings

Not scheduled

20m

Lecture

Description

Compton collisions between lasers and electrons are widely regarded as one of the most promising approaches to reach extremely high electromagnetic fields in the electron rest frame, thereby enabling the exploration of strong-field QED. In this regime, the emission of gamma-rays via non-linear inverse Compton scattering becomes fundamentally quantum, as the electron can transfer a significant portion of its energy to the emitted photon.

Various schemes have been proposed to study laser–electron collisions, most of which rely on a two-laser configuration: one laser to drive laser-wakefield acceleration and generate high-energy electrons, and a second, tightly focused laser to collide with the accelerated electrons.

Here we present a single-laser scheme where the laser both accelerates electrons to multi-GeV energies and is then reflected off a plastic foil to collide head-on with the electrons, producing gamma-rays. This approach offers the practical advantages of using a single laser and ensures automatic spatial and temporal overlap between the laser and the electron beam, leading to a 100% collision success rate.

We report on experimental campaigns conducted at ELI-NP and APOLLON, where gamma-rays reaching the GeV scale were generated and where quantum effects may start to be visible. This dual-facility approach enables a comparison of gamma-ray production across disparate energy scales, with each set of results benchmarked against Ptarmigan simulations.