Impact of quantum effects on relativistic electron motion in a chaotic regime

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2015 Oct;92(4):043105. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.92.043105. Epub 2015 Oct 19.

Abstract

The impact of quantum effects on electron dynamics in a plane linearly polarized standing wave with relativistic amplitudes is considered. Using spectral analysis of Lyapunov characteristic exponents with and without radiation losses we show that the contraction effect of phase space due to the radiation reaction force in the classical form does not occur in the quantum case when the discreteness of photon emission is taken into account. It is also demonstrated that electron bunch kinetics has a diffusion solution rather than the d'Alambert type solution as in the classical description. For this case, we applied the Markov chain formalism and showed that this method gives exact characteristics of electron bunch evolution, such as motion of the center of mass and electron bunch dimensions.