Enhanced gamma-ray emission from all-optical nonlinear inverse Compton scattering with down-ramp density plasma

Hailong Zhou; Lu Yang; Xiaofei Lan; Yongsheng Huang; Yangfan He

doi:10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01541-y

2023 Impact factor 2.6

Special Topics

Laser Induced High Energy Density Physics

Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top.
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01541-y

Regular Article

Enhanced gamma-ray emission from all-optical nonlinear inverse Compton scattering with down-ramp density plasma

Hailong Zhou¹, Lu Yang¹, Xiaofei Lan¹^a, Yongsheng Huang²^,3^b and Yangfan He¹

¹ School of Physics and Astronomy, China West Normal University, 637009, Nanchong, Sichuan, China
² School of Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, 518107, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
³ Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, China

^a lan-x-f@163.com
^b huangysh59@mail.sysu.edu.cn

Received: 6 June 2024
Accepted: 21 February 2025
Published online: 10 March 2025

Abstract

The impressive progress in high-powered lasers has resulted in all-optical nonlinear inverse Compton scattering emerging as a potential method for generating ultra-short, brilliant $γ$ $\gamma$ ray in a remarkably compact setup. Nonetheless, the conversion efficiency and energy of currently implemented Compton $γ$ $\gamma$ -ray sources are still low. We present three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations investigating the $γ$ $\gamma$ -ray emission resulting from the interaction of a femtosecond laser pulse ( $I = 5 \times 10^{21}$ $I = 5 \times 10^{21}$ ${W / cm}^{2}$ $\mathrm{W/cm}^{2}$ ) with a down-ramp density plasma. Our study reveals that a down-ramp density plasma affects the self-injection of electrons, resulting in a lower self-injection threshold. Consequently, more electrons can be trapped in the wakefield for acceleration. The simulation results demonstrate the production of high-energy $γ$ $\gamma$ ray with a maximum energy of $E_{γ, max}$ $E_{\gamma , \max }$ = 148.18 $MeV$ $\textrm{MeV}$ and a low emittance of $θ_{γ}$ $\theta _{\gamma }$ = 4.2 $mm \cdot mrad$ $\textrm{mm} \cdot \textrm{mrad}$ . Compared to the scheme without down-ramp density plasma, the conversion efficiency of laser energy to photons is improved from approximately 0.13 to 0.29%. With this scheme, we can avoid using high-power laser pulses and generate high-energy $γ$ $\gamma$ ray by using shaped-intensity laser pulses. This broadens the application range of all-optical Compton scattering.

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Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.