Spatiotemporal dynamics of ultrarelativistic beam-plasma instabilities

An electron or electron-positron beam streaming through a plasma is notoriously prone to micro-instabilities. For a dilute ultrarelativistic infinite beam, the dominant instability is a mixed mode between longitudinal two-stream and transverse filamentation modes, with a phase velocity oblique to the beam velocity. A spatiotemporal theory describing the linear growth of this oblique mixed instability is proposed, which predicts that spatiotemporal effects generally prevail for finite-length beams, leading to a significantly slower instability evolution than in the usually assumed purely temporal regime. These results are accurately supported by particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Furthermore, we show that the self-focusing dynamics caused by the plasma wakefields driven by finite-width beams can compete with the oblique instability. Analyzed through PIC simulations, the interplay of these two processes in realistic systems bears important implications for upcoming accelerator experiments on ultrarelativistic beam-plasma interactions

Probing strong-field QED in beam-plasma collisions

Ongoing progress in laser and accelerator technology opens new possibilities in high-field science, notably for the study of the largely unexplored strong-field QED regime where electron-positron pairs can be created directly from light-matter or even light-vacuum interactions. Laserless strategies such as beam-beam collisions have also been proposed with the prospect of pushing strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED) in the nonpertubative regime. Here we report on an original concept to probe strong-field QED by harnessing the interaction between an electron beam and a solid target. When a high-density, ultrarelativistic beam impinges onto an even denser plasma, the beam self fields are reflected at the plasma boundary. In the rest frame of the beam electrons, these fields can exceed the Schwinger field, leading to strong-field QED effects such as quantum nonlinear inverse Compton scattering and nonlinear Breit-Wheeler electron-positron pair creation. We show that such beam-plasma collisions can produce results similar to beam-beam collisions with the advantage of a much simpler experimental setup including the automatic overlap between the beam and the reflected fields. This scenario opens the way to precision studies of strong-field QED, with measurable clear signatures in terms of gamma-ray photon and pair production, and thus is a very promising milestone on the path towards laserless studies of nonperturbative SFQED