Abstract
We study nonlinear trident in laser pulses in the high-energy limit, where the initial electron experiences, in its rest frame, an electromagnetic field strength above Schwinger’s critical field. At lower energies the dominant contribution comes from the “two-step” part, but in the high-energy limit the dominant contribution comes instead from the one-step term. We obtain new approximations that explain the relation between the high-energy limit of trident and pair production by a Coulomb field, as well as the role of the Weizsäcker-Williams approximation and why it does not agree with the high- limit of the locally-constant-field approximation. We also show that the next-to-leading order in the large- expansion is, in the high-energy limit, nonlocal and is numerically very important even for quite large . We show that the small- perturbation series has a finite radius of convergence, but using Padé-conformal methods we obtain resummations that go beyond the radius of convergence and have a large numerical overlap with the large- approximation. We use Borel-Padé-conformal methods to resum the small- expansion and obtain a high precision up to very large . We also use newer resummation methods based on hypergeometric/Meijer-G and confluent hypergeometric functions.
3 More- Received 20 July 2020
- Accepted 8 October 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.102.096008
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