Original authors: Samuel R Yoffe, Yevgen Kravets, Adam Noble and Dino A Jaroszynski
Link to paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/17/5/053025
Citation: Samuel R Yoffe et al 2015 New J. Phys. 17 053025
Notebook by: Óscar Amaro (2023)
Abstract: With the emergence in the next few years of a new breed of high power laser facilities, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how interacting with intense laser pulses affects the bulk properties of a relativistic electron beam. A detailed analysis of the radiative cooling of electrons indicates that, classically, equal contributions to the phase space contraction occur in the transverse and longitudinal directions. In the weakly quantum regime, in addition to an overall reduction in beam cooling, this symmetry is broken, leading to significantly less cooling in the longitudinal than the transverse directions. By introducing an efficient new technique for studying the evolution of a particle distribution, we demonstrate the quantum reduction in beam cooling, and find that it depends on the distribution of energy in the laser pulse, rather than just the total energy as in the classical case.