Realising Single-Shot Measurements of Quantum Radiation Reaction in High-Intensity Lasers

Understand

Collisions between high intensity laser pulses and energetic electron beams are now used to measure the transition between the classical and quantum regimes of light-matter interactions.

• However, the energy spectrum of laser-wakefield-accelerated electron beams can fluctuate significantly from shot to shot, making it difficult to clearly discern quantum effects in radiation reaction, for example.
• Here we show how this can be accomplished in only a single laser shot.
• A millimeter-scale pre-collision drift allows the electron beam to expand to a size larger than the laser focal spot and develop a correlation between transverse position and angular divergence.