Toward the experimental observation of nonlinear effects in laser-electron beam scattering

We constructed an experimental system to observe nonlinear effects in the Compton scattering. The electron beam is supplied by an electron gun and a photon beam comes from a table-top tera-watt laser system. As a test experiment, we measured the Compton scattering in linear regime and had a good agreement with simulations, indicating that the background level of the system was under control and the detection efficiency was well estimated. The simulation study shows that it is necessary to use a laser beam with an inclined polarization plane to obtain a maximal amount of second harmonics in photon-electron scattering.