Experimental observation of optical rotation generated in vacuum by a magnetic field
High Energy Physics - Experiment
2008-11-26 v3 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Abstract
We report the experimental observation of a light polarization rotation in vacuum in the presence of a transverse magnetic field. Assuming that data distribution is Gaussian, the average measured rotation is (3.9+/-0.5)e-12 rad/pass, at 5 T with 44000 passes through a 1m long magnet, with lambda = 1064 nm. The relevance of this result in terms of the existence of a light, neutral, spin-zero particle is discussed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ex/0507107,
title = {Experimental observation of optical rotation generated in vacuum by a magnetic field},
author = {E. Zavattini and G. Zavattini and G. Ruoso and E. Polacco and E. Milotti and M. Karuza and U. Gastaldi and G. Di Domenico and F. Della Valle and R. Cimino and S. Carusotto and G. Cantatore and M. Bregant},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ex/0507107},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
11 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letters Comment to version 2: minor changes to abstract and final discussion. Added 2 references Comment to version 3: corrected minor typographical errors, eliminated the distinction between scalar and pseudoscalar in the particle interpretation of the result