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Ultrarelativistic electron states in a general background electromagnetic field

The feasibility of obtaining exact analytical results in the realm of QED in the presence of a background electromagnetic field is almost exclusively limited to a few tractable cases, where the Dirac equation in the corresponding background field can be solved analytically. This circumstance has restricted, in particular, the theoretical analysis of QED processes in intense laser fields to within the plane-wave approximation even at those high intensities, achievable experimentally only by tightly focusing the laser energy in space. Here, within the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) or eikonal approximation, we construct analytically single-particle electron states in the presence of a background electromagnetic field of general space-time structure in the realistic assumption that the initial energy of the electron is the largest dynamical energy scale in the problem. The relatively compact expression of these states opens, in particular, the possibility of investigating analytically strong-field QED processes in the presence of spatially focused laser beams, which is of particular relevance in view of the upcoming experimental campaigns in this field.