Integration of the Lorentz-Dirac equation: Interaction of an intense laser pulse with high-energy electrons

Usually the motion of an electron under the influence of electromagnetic fields is influenced to a small extent by radiation damping. With the advent of high power high irradiance lasers it has become possible to generate focused laser irradiances where electrons interacting with the laser become highly relativistic over very short time and spatial scales. By focusing petawatt class lasers to very small spot sizes the amount of radiation emitted by electrons can become very large. Resultingly, the damping of the electron motion by the emission of this radiation can become large. In order to study this problem a code is written to solve a set of equations describing the evolution of a strong electromagnetic wave interacting with a single electron. Usually the equation of motion of an electron including radiation damping under the influence of electromagnetic fields is derived from the Lorentz-Dirac equation treating the damping as a perturbation. We use this equation to integrate forward in time and use the Lorentz-Dirac equation to integrate backward in time. We show that for very short wavelength electromagnetic radiation deep in the quantum regime at high irradiances differences between the perturbation equation and Lorentz-Dirac can be seen. However, for electron motion in the classical regime the differences are negligible. For electron motion in the classical regime the first order damping equation is found to be very adequate.