Speaker:
Sang Pyo Kim
Institution:
Kunsan National Univ.
Speaker Link:
Date:
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Time:
12:30 pm
Location:
NS2 2201
ABSTRACT:
With the chirped pulsed amplification (CPA) technique by Mourou, ultra-strong lasers have been developed very rapidly in the past two decades. Currently, the Center for Relativistic Laser Sciences (CoReLS), an IBS center in Korea, has achieved the highest intensity of a few PW, which could accelerate electrons to a few GeV and protons to several tens of MeV via the laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) by Tajima and Dawson. Extreme-Light-Infrastructure (ELI)-Nuclear Physics (NP) in Rumania is planning to operate two 10 PW beamlines of lasers in 2015, and International Zetta-Exawatt Science Technology (IZEST) is aiming for ZW and EW lasers. ZW lasers focused to an area of micrometers could even reach the critical strength for electron-positron pairs production from the Dirac vacuum. Ultra-strong lasers may provide an arena for testing nonperturbative aspects of quantum field theory in strong background fields such as Schwinger mechanism and Hawking radiation as a gravity analog, etc.
The progress and perspective of QED phenomena in strong electromagnetic (EM) fields will be critically reviewed. It has been long known since Heisenberg-Euler, Weisskopf, and Schwinger’s seminal works on QED actions that extreme EM fields could polarize the vacuum to make a quantum vacuum and an ultra-strong electric field could create electron-positron pairs from the Dirac vacuum. The quantum vacuum in EM fields has been an interesting and hot issue from both an observational view point in astrophysics and from an experimental view point in ultra-strong laser sources, such as ELI and IZEST. Field theoretical attempts such as gamma-function regularization will be reviewed to explain what to be expected from ultra-strong EM fields, in particular, from localized pulsed electromagnetic fields, such as ELI and IZEST. Further, the formulae for Schwinger pair production will be introduced such as the phase-integral method and the contour integral method in a complex of time or space. Finally, the fundamental physics such as dark matter and energy using ultra-strong EM fields will be discussed.
1 Dept. of Physics, Kunsan National University, Kunsan 573-701, Korea
2Center for Relativistic Laser Sciences, Institute for Basic Sciences, Gwangju 500-712, Korea*
Norman Rostoker Visiting Scholar (Feb. 1-14, 2014)
Host:
Toshiki Tajima