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The next few years will see next-generation high-power laser facilities (such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure) become operational, for which it is important to understand how interaction with intense laser pulses affects the bulk properties of a relativistic electron beam. At such high field intensities, we expect both radiation reaction and quantum effects to play a significant role in the beam dynamics. The resulting reduction in relative energy spread (beam cooling) at the expense of mean beam energy predicted by classical theories of radiation reaction depends only on the energy of the laser pulse. Quantum effects suppress this cooling, with the dynamics additionally sensitive to the distribution of energy within the pulse. Since chirps occur in both the production of high-intensity pulses (CPA) and the propagation of pulses in media, the effect of using chirps to modify the pulse shape has been investigated using a semi-classical extension to the Landau--Lifshitz theory. Results indicate that even large chirps introduce a significantly smaller change to final state predictions than going from a classical to quantum model for radiation reaction, the nature of which can be intuitively understood., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. Invited paper: SPIE Optics + Optoelectronics: Relativistic Plasma Waves and Particle Beams as Coherent and Incoherent Radiation Sources. Prague, CZ (April 2015)

With the emergence in the next few years of a new breed of high power laser facilities, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how interacting with intense laser pulses affects the bulk properties of a relativistic electron beam. A detailed analysis of the radiative cooling of electrons indicates that, classically, equal contributions to the phase space contraction occur in the transverse and longitudinal directions. In the weakly quantum regime, in addition to an overall reduction in beam cooling, this symmetry is broken, leading to significantly less cooling in the longitudinal than the transverse directions. By introducing an efficient new technique for studying the evolution of a particle distribution, we demonstrate the quantum reduction in beam cooling, and find that it depends on the distribution of energy in the laser pulse, rather than just the total energy as in the classical case., Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1410.1759

We present a novel technique for studying the evolution of a particle distribution using single particle dynamics such that the distribution can be accurately reconstructed using fewer particles than existing approaches. To demonstrate this, the Landau-Lifshiftz description of radiation reaction is adapted into a semi-classical model, for which the Vlasov equation is intractable. Collision between an energetic electron bunch and high-intensity laser pulses are then compared using the two theories. Reduction in beam cooling is observed for the semi-classical case., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, supplemental material