Abstract

We use quantum electrodynamics (QED) to investigate the possibility of radiative interference from a single laser-driven electron wave packet. Intuition gleaned from classical electrodynamics suggests that radiation from a large electron wave packet might interfere destructively when different regions of the packet oscillate out of phase with each other. We show that when the incident light is represented with a multi-mode coherent state, the relative phases of the electron's constituent momenta have no influence of the amount of scattered light. Hence, the radiation does not depend on the amount of free-particle spreading experienced by the electron before the interaction. This result is shown to hold to all orders of perturbation theory. We extend our conclusions using the Furry picture of QED, where the (now-classical) incident light pulse is treated non-perturbatively with Volkov functions. We connect our results to a first-quantized picture by comparing transition probabilities between QED and semiclassical models. We are able to match these probabilities by choosing the classical scattered light field to be a single mode with energy hω'.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Physics and Astronomy

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