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Abstract

In this thesis, electroweak processes in relativistic lepton-antilepton collisions taking place inside strong laser fields are studied. The energy of the pre-accelerated particles can be vastly enhanced by their interaction with the intense laser field in such a scenario. The main effort of the investigations presented in this work lies in the examination of the associated production of Higgs and Z^0 bosons. Since laser experiments most commonly employ lasers of either circular or linear polarization, the total cross section of the reaction as well as the energy distribution of the produced Higgs boson are discussed in detail for both of these polarizations. The findings are related to feld-free collisions of comparable collision energies. Special attention is paid to the linear polarization case since it is more appealing in view of an experimental implementation. The required laser parameters for such an implementation and the experimental challenges that need to be overcome are specified. As another example for a laser-boosted reaction, the production of muon-antimuon pairs in electron-positron collisions taking place in a laser field is studied. This process can in principle be experimentally realized using present-day technology and thus might serve as a proof-of-principle experiment for the concepts underlying this work.