Published September 1997 | Version v1
Journal article

Positron Production in Multiphoton Light-by-Light Scattering

  • 1. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94309 (United States)
  • 2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996 (United States)
  • 3. Joseph Henry Laboratories, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544 (United States)
  • 4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627 (United States)

Description

A signal of 106±14 positrons above background has been observed in collisions of a low-emittance 46.6GeV electron beam with terawatt pulses from a Nd:glass laser at 527nm wavelength in an experiment at the Final Focus Test Beam at SLAC. The positrons are interpreted as arising from a two-step process in which laser photons are backscattered to GeV energies by the electron beam followed by a collision between the high-energy photon and several laser photons to produce an electron-positron pair. These results are the first laboratory evidence for inelastic light-by-light scattering involving only real photons. copyright 1997 The American Physical Society

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review Letters
Journal Volume
79
Journal Issue
9
Journal Page Range
p. 1626-1629
ISSN
0031-9007
CODEN
PRLTAO