Characterization of ultra-intense laser in radiation damping regime using ponderomotive scattering

Abstract

We present a novel approach to analyzing phase-space distributions of electrons ponderomotively scattered off an ultra-intense laser pulse and comment on the implications for the thus conceivable in-situ laser-characterization schemes. To this end, we present fully relativistic test particle simulations of electrons scattered from an ultra-intense, counter-propagating laser pulse. The simulations unveil non-trivial scalings of the scattered electron distribution with the laser intensity, pulse duration, beam waist, and energy of the electron bunch. We quantify the found scalings by means of an analytical expression for the scattering angle of an electron bunch ponderomotively scattered from a counter-propagating, ultra-intense laser pulse, also accounting for radiation reaction (RR) through the Landau–Lifshitz (LL) model. For various laser and bunch parameters, the derived formula is in excellent quantitative agreement with the simulations. We also demonstrate how, in the radiation-dominated regime, a simple re-scaling of our model’s input parameter yields quantitative agreement with numerical simulations based on the LL model.