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Influence of the intensity gradient upon HHG from free electrons scattered by an intense laser beam

When an electron is scattered by a tightly-focused laser beam in vacuum, the intensity gradient is a critical factor to influence the electron dynamics, for example, the electron energy exchange with the laser fields as have been explored before [P.X.Wang et al.,J. Appl. Phys. 91, 856 (2002]. In this paper, we have further investigated its influence upon the electron high-harmonic generation (HHG) by treating the spacial gradient of the laser intensity as a ponderomotive potential. Based upon perturbative QED calculations, it has been found that the main effect of the intensity gradient is the broadening of the originally line HHG spectra. A one-to-one relationship can be built between the beam width and the corresponding line width. Hence this finding may provides us a promising way to measure the beam width of intense lasers in experiments. In addition, for a laser pulse, we have also studied the different influences from transverse and longitudinal intensity gradients upon HHG.