Experimental investigations of hard photon emission from strong crystalline fields

Abstract For the first time very pronounced high-energy photon peaks have been measured in the radiation emission from 70, 150 and 240 GeV electrons incident at 0.1–1.0 mrad to the axis in diamond and Si crystals. The energy of the photons in the peaks is 0.7–0.8 times the particle energy with yields of 50 times the Bethe-Heitler one (in diamond). The peaks consist of single photons and are caused by the influence of strong crystalline fields on emission of coherent bremsstrahlung, emitted when the ultrarelativistic electrons cross the rows of atoms in a crystal plane. The effect should be envisaged as a source for nearly monoenergetic photons in the multihundred GeV-region.