Sebastian Meuren
Collaborator (Strong-Field QED / Laboratory Astrophysics)
I am a Junior Professor at LULI/CNRS/Institut Polytechnique de Paris and the Principle Investigator (PI) of the Experiment 320 at SLAC’s FACET-II facility.
By colliding a 10 GeV, high-quality electron beam from the SLAC RF-LINAC with 10 TW NIR laser pulses, E-320 can probe the QED critical (Schwinger) intensity in the electron rest frame. In this regime, quantum corrections to classical synchrotron radiation become important and the probability for electron-positron pair production is no longer exponentially suppressed. Thus, we are able to probe conditions that are, at least in some aspects, similar to those encountered close to the surface of a magnetar.
In the future I would also like to carry out SFQED experiments at the 10 PW laser Apollon in Paris. Before starting to work experimentally at SLAC, I carried out theoretical QED calculations in the presence of a strong electromagnetic background field.
Five recent relevant references
S. Meuren (on behalf of the E-320 collaboration) “E-320 FY22 Progress and Plans for FY23”, Progress Report given at the FACET-II PAC Meeting 2022
K. Qu, S. Meuren, and N. J. Fisch, “Signature of Collective Plasma Effects in Beam-Driven QED Cascades”, PRL 127, 095001 (2021)
V. Yakimenko, S. Meuren, F. Del Gaudio et al., “Prospect of Studying Nonperturbative QED with Beam-Beam Collisions”, PRL 122, 190404 (2019)
S. Bragin, S. Meuren, C. H. Keitel, and A. Di Piazza “High-Energy Vacuum Birefringence and Dichroism in an Ultrastrong Laser Field”, PRL 119, 250403 (2017)
S. Meuren et al., “High-Energy Recollision Processes of Laser-Generated Electron-Positron Pairs” PRL 114, 143201 (2015)