Efficient High-Energy Photon Production in the Supercritical QED Regime

Abstract: When dense high-energy lepton bunches collide, the beam particles can experience rest-frame electromagnetic fields which greatly exceed the QED critical one. Here it is demonstrated that beamstrahlung efficiently converts lepton energy to high-energy photons in this so-called supercritical QED regime, as the single-photon emission spectrum exhibits a pronounced peak close to the initial lepton energy. It is also shown that the observation of this high-energy peak in the photon spectrum requires one to mitigate multiple photon emissions during the interaction. Otherwise, the photon recoil induces strong correlations between subsequent emissions which soften the photon spectrum and suppress the peak. The high-energy peak in the photon spectrum constitutes a unique observable of photon emission in the supercritical QED regime, and provides decisive advantages for the realization of an efficient multi-TeV laserless gamma-gamma collider based on electron-electron collisions.