Experimental investigation of the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect in low-Z targets

In the CERN NA63 collaboration we have addressed the question of the potential inadequacy of the commonly used Migdal formulation of the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect by measuring the photon emission by 20 and 178 GeV electrons in the range 100 MeV - 4 GeV, in targets of LowDensityPolyEthylene (LDPE), C, Al, Ti, Fe, Cu, Mo and, as a reference target, Ta. For each target and energy, a comparison between simulated values based on the LPM suppression of incoherent bremsstrahlung is shown, taking multi-photon effects into account. For these targets and energies, we find that Migdal's theoretical formulation is adequate to a precision of better than about 5%, irrespective of the target substance.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figure

Experimental investigations of synchrotron radiation at the onset of the quantum regime

The classical description of synchrotron radiation fails at large Lorentz factors, $\gamma$, for relativistic electrons crossing strong transverse magnetic fields $B$. In the rest frame of the electron this field is comparable to the so-called critical field $B_0 = 4.414\cdot10^9$ T. For $\chi = \gamma B/B_0 \simeq 1$ quantum corrections are essential for the description of synchrotron radiation to conserve energy. With electrons of energies 10-150 GeV penetrating a germanium single crystal along the $$ axis, we have experimentally investigated the transition from the regime where classical synchrotron radiation is an adequate description, to the regime where the emission drastically changes character; not only in magnitude, but also in spectral shape. The spectrum can only be described by quantum synchrotron radiation formulas. Apart from being a test of strong-field quantum electrodynamics, the experimental results are also relevant for the design of future linear colliders where beamstrahlung - a closely related process - may limit the achievable luminosity.Comment: 11 pages, 18 figures, submitted to PR

Y-System and Deformed Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz

We introduce a new tool, the Deformed TBA (Deformed Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz), to analyze the monodromy problem of the cubic oscillator. The Deformed TBA is a system of five coupled nonlinear integral equations, which in a particular case reduces to the Zamolodchikov TBA equation for the 3-state Potts model. Our method generalizes the Dorey-Tateo analysis of the (monomial) cubic oscillator. We introduce a Y-system corresponding to the Deformed TBA and give it an elegant geometric interpretation.Comment: 12 pages. Minor corrections in Section