Lasertron: generation of powerful nuclear-short electromagnetic bursts

Summary form only given. Sub-femtosecond, electromagnetic pulses, of much interest presently, are short on the time scale of condensed-matter processes. Six orders of magnitude, however, separate them from the next time scale of interest, that of nuclear interactions (10/sup -21/-10/sup -22/ s). Such pulses seem so much out of reach today that no one so far has considered their feasibility. In this paper, we demonstrate theoretically that such pulses can in fact be generated using a Petawatt laser, while more widely available terawatt lasers may generate sub-attosecond pulses. The pulses would be radiated by electrons rotating ultra-relativistically in high-intensity laser fields. It is basically synchrotron radiation; however, no synchrotron can even come close to running electrons with the energy of 50 MeV around a circle of 0.1 /spl mu/m radius, as a Petawatt laser can. We will call such a system "lasertron.".