Speaker
Description
Flying focus beams are exact solutions of the Maxwell equations with spatial focussing, a feature which is absent in plane waves. In the first instance, these flying focus solutions are complex-valued; unfortunately, taking the real part of this field results in background-coupled wave equations for particles interacting with the real background field that are complicated PDEs. In this talk, we'll discuss how keeping the original, complex flying focus solution enables remarkable analytic calculations. In particular, the complex-valued flying focus beam is a self-dual Maxwell field, and the hidden integrability associated with this fact makes it possible to solve background-coupled wave equations exactly in the ultrarelativistic (massless) regime. This enables analytic computation of non-linear Compton scattering, as well as multi-emission amplitudes in 'maximal helicity violating' configurations. These scattering amplitudes on the complex field can in turn be viewed as encoding depletion on the real-valued background.
