  Ongoing progress in laser and accelerator technology opens new possibilities
in high-field science, notably to investigate the largely unexplored
strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED) regime where electron-positron
pairs can be created directly from light-matter or even light-vacuum
interactions. Laserless strategies such as beam-beam collisions have also been
proposed to access the nonperturbative limit of SFQED. Here we report on a
concept to probe SFQED by harnessing the interaction between a high-charge,
ultrarelativistic electron beam and a solid conducting target. When impinging
onto the target surface, the beam self fields are reflected, partly or fully,
depending on the beam shape; in the rest frame of the beam electrons, these
fields can exceed the Schwinger field, thus triggering SFQED effects such as
quantum nonlinear inverse Compton scattering and nonlinear Breit-Wheeler
electron-positron pair creation. Through reduced modeling and kinetic numerical
simulations, we show that this single-beam setup can achieve interaction
conditions similar to those envisioned in beam-beam collisions, but in a
simpler and more controllable way owing to the automatic overlap of the beam
and driving fields. This scheme thus eases the way to precision studies of
SFQED and is also a promising milestone towards laserless studies of
nonperturbative SFQED.
