Speaker
Description
The proposed LUXE experiment (Laser Und XFEL Experiment) at DESY, Hamburg, using the 16.5 GeV electron beam extracted from the European XFEL, aims to study collisions between high-intensity laser pulses and high-energy electron or secondary photon beams. This will elucidate quantum electrodynamics (QED) at the strong-field frontier, where the electromagnetic field of the laser in the probe particle rest frame is above the Schwinger limit. In this regime, QED is non-perturbative. This manifests itself in the creation of physical electron-positron pairs from the QED vacuum, similar to Hawking radiation from black holes. LUXE intends to measure the positron production rate in an unprecedented laser intensity regime. This talk will discuss the physics goals and experimental challenges of LUXE, and give an overview of ideas for further on-site experiments on strong-field QED at DESY.
