• Open Access

Testing Strong Field QED Close to the Fully Nonperturbative Regime Using Aligned Crystals

A. Di Piazza, T. N. Wistisen, M. Tamburini, and U. I. Uggerhøj
Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 044801 – Published 28 January 2020

Abstract

Processes occurring in the strong field regime of QED are characterized by background electromagnetic fields of the order of the critical field Fcr=m2c3/|e| in the rest frame of participating charges. It has been conjectured that if in their rest frame electrons and positrons experience field strengths of the order of Fcr/α3/21600Fcr, with α1/137 being the fine-structure constant, their effective coupling with radiation becomes of the order of unity. Here we show that channeling radiation by ultrarelativistic electrons with energies of the order of a few TeV on thin tungsten crystals allows us to test the predictions of QED close to this fully nonperturbative regime by measuring the angularly resolved single photon intensity spectrum. The proposed setup features the unique characteristics that essentially all electrons (1) undergo at most a single photon emission and (2) experience at the moment of emission and in the angular region of interest the maximum allowed value of the field strength, which at 2 TeV exceeds Fcr by more than 2 orders of magnitude in their rest frame.

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  • Received 12 November 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.044801

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Accelerators & BeamsParticles & Fields

Authors & Affiliations

A. Di Piazza*, T. N. Wistisen, and M. Tamburini

  • Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Saupfercheckweg 1, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany

U. I. Uggerhøj

  • Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 120, DK-8000 Aarhus, Denmark

  • *dipiazza@mpi-hd.mpg.de

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Vol. 124, Iss. 4 — 31 January 2020

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