All-optical Compton gamma-ray source

All-optical Compton gamma-ray source

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Gamma-Ray Astronomy in the Compton Era

Compton Echoes from Gamma-ray Bursts

Recent observations of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have provided growing evidence for collimated outflows and emission, and strengthened the connection between GRBs and supernovae. If massive stars are the progenitors of GRBs, the hard photon pulse will propagate in the pre-burst, dense environment. Circumstellar material will Compton scatter the prompt GRB radiation and give rise to a reflection e...

Compton dragged gamma–ray bursts: the spectrum

We calculate the spectrum resulting from the interaction of a fireball with ambient soft photons. These photons are assumed to be produced by the walls of a funnel in a massive star. By parameterizing the radial dependence of the funnel temperature we calculate the deceleration of the fireball self–consistently, taking into account the absorption of high energy γ–rays due to interaction with th...

High efficiency x-ray source based on inverse Compton scattering in an optical Bragg structure

Existing x-ray sources based on inverse Compton scattering rely on free-space lasers and have modest efficiency due to the inherent limitation of maintaining their peak field intensity over a few Rayleigh lengths. Moreover, their typical interaction spots are tens of micrometres in diameter and they rely on large electron accelerators. We propose a new structure that mitigates many of these lim...