Abstract
We present the dimensioning of a photon-photon collider based on Compton gamma sources for the observation of Breit-Wheeler pair production and QED $\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\gamma}$ events. Two symmetric electron beams, generated by photocathodes and accelerated in linacs, produce two gamma ray beams through Compton back scattering with two J-class lasers. Tuning the system energy above the Breit-Wheeler cross section threshold, a flux of electron-positron pairs is generated out of light-light interaction. The process is analyzed by start-to-end simulations. Realistic numbers of the secondary particle yield, referring to existing state-of-the-art set-ups and a discussion of the feasibility of the experiment taking into account the background signal are presented.
Highlights
We present the dimensioning of a photon-photon collider based on Compton gamma sources for the observation of Breit-Wheeler pair production and quantum electrodynamics (QED) γγ events
Two symmetric electron beams, generated by photocathodes and accelerated in linacs, produce two gamma ray beams through Compton back scattering with two J-class lasers
The recent development of high-energy, high-brilliance photon pulses and high-brightness electron beams opens the way to the study of quantum electrodynamics (QED) processes so far unobserved or detected only in indirect way
Summary
The recent development of high-energy, high-brilliance photon pulses and high-brightness electron beams opens the way to the study of quantum electrodynamics (QED) processes so far unobserved or detected only in indirect way. Other QED collisions such as secondary Compton (e−γ → e−γ), Møller scattering (e−e− → e−e−), triplet pair (TPP, γe− → e−eþe−), and muon pair photo-production (MPP, γe− → e−μþμ−) take place in this framework because of collisions between the primary electron beams and the Compton back-scattered photons. These processes produce a potentially interfering background, but they can be discriminated thanks to their angular distributions which are different from those of elastic γγ scattering and BWPP; they are an interesting source of particle-antiparticle pairs. We show that the background from TPP, Møller, and Compton scattering, that we quantify and discuss, is not a limiting factor in measurements of BWPP
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