Novel Signatures of Radiation Reaction in Electron-Laser Sidescattering

In this article we investigate novel signatures of radiation reaction via the angular deflection of an electron beam colliding at 90 degrees with an intense laser pulse. Due to the radiation reaction effect, the electrons can be deflected towards the beam axis for plane wave backgrounds, which is not possible in the absence of radiation reaction effects. The magnitude and size of the deflection angle can be controlled by tailoring the laser pulse shapes. The effect is first derived analytically using the Landau-Lifshitz equation, which allows to determine the important scaling behavior with laser intensity and particle energy. We then move on to full scale 3D Monte Carlo simulations to verify the effect is observable with present day laser technology. We investigate the opportunities for an indirect observation of laser depletion in such side scattering scenarios.

This record contains SMILEI namelists for the 1D and 3D simulations we have performed for this study. The open source particle-in-cell code SMILEI which we employed for our study can be found here: https://github.com/SmileiPIC/Smilei. Our simulations were performed on SMILEI v4.8