Nonperturbative treatment of double Compton backscattering in intense laser fields

Abstract

The emission of a pair of entangled photons by an electron in an intense laser field can be described by two-photon transitions of laser-dressed, relativistic Dirac--Volkov states. In the limit of a small laser field intensity, the two-photon transition amplitude approaches the result predicted by double Compton scattering theory. Multi-exchange processes with the laser field, including a large number of exchanged laser photons, cannot be described without the fully relativistic Dirac--Volkov propagator. The nonperturbative treatment significantly alters theoretical predictions for future experiments of this kind. We quantify the degree of polarization correlation of the photons in the final state by employing the well-established concurrence as a measure of the entanglement.