Uniform locally constant field approximation for photon-seeded pair production

Abstract

A challenge to upcoming experiments that plan to collide a particle beam with laser pulses of moderate intensity is how to correctly incorporate quantum effects into simulation frameworks. Using a uniform approach, we extend the widely-used locally constant field approximation (LCFA) to derive an improved rate of photon-seeded pair creation (the nonlinear Breit-Wheeler process). By benchmarking our "ULCFA" expressions with the lightfront spectrum of: i) exact analytical results and ii) numerical integration of the QED probability for short pulses, we show that our extended approach remains accurate at smaller values of the intensity parameter than the standard LCFA.