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Phys. Rev. A 80, 053419 (2009) [14 pages]

Correlated two-photon emission by transitions of Dirac-Volkov states in intense laser fields: QED predictions

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Erik Lötstedt*
Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Postfach 103980, 69029 Heidelberg, Germany

Ulrich D. Jentschura
Department of Physics, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, Missouri 65409-0640, USA and Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 16, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany

Received 26 August 2009; published 20 November 2009

In an intense laser field, an electron may decay by emitting a pair of photons. The two photons emitted during the process, which can be interpreted as a laser-dressed double Compton scattering, remain entangled in a quantifiable way: namely, the so-called concurrence of the photon polarizations gives a gauge-invariant measure of the correlation of the hard gamma rays. We calculate the differential rate and concurrence for a backscattering setup of the electron and photon beam, employing Volkov states and propagators for the electron lines, thus accounting nonperturbatively for the electron-laser interaction. The nonperturbative results are shown to differ significantly compared to those obtained from the usual double Compton scattering.

© 2009 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.80.053419
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevA.80.053419
PACS:
34.50.Rk, 12.20.Ds, 32.80.Wr, 03.65.Ud

*Present address: Department of Chemistry, School of Science, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan; erik.loetstedt@mpi-hd.mpg.de