Formation of beams of charged particles in multibeam systems of an electric dipole configuration at a multipetawatt power level

Abstract: We proposed to use multipetawatt multibeam systems that reproduce a dipole wave of the electric configuration to maximise the electric field in the interaction region and the energy of accelerated particles. The breakdown of vacuum in fields of this configuration leads to the formation of beams of electrons and positrons accelerated to several GeV. It is shown that when use is made of 12 laser pulses with a duration of 30 fs and a total power of 36 PW, the total charge of accelerated electrons (positrons) can reach 250–270 nC, and the charge of particles with energies above 1 GeV can exceed 1 nC. It is demonstrated that the electric dipole structure of the fields makes it possible to obtain an extremely narrow (several mrad) distribution of particles over the polar angle measured from the field symmetry axis. It is also shown that the distribution of particles over the azimuthal angle can be used to diagnose interaction regimes during vacuum breakdown. The obtained results can be useful in preparing experiments on the promising XCELS laser system.

Keywords: QED cascade, electron–positron plasma, particle acceleration, multibeam configurations, multipetawatt systems, XCELS