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Magnetic fields play an important role in plasma dynamics, yet it is a quantity difficult to measure accurately with physical probes, whose presence disturbs the very field they measure. The Faraday rotation of a polarized beam of light…
A magnetometric technique is demonstrated that may be suitable for precision measurements of fields ranging from the sub-microgauss level to above the Earth field. It is based on resonant nonlinear magneto-optical rotation caused by atoms…
We describe a technique for mapping the spatial variation of static electric, static magnetic, and rf magnetic fields using a pulsed atomic or molecular beam. The method is demonstrated using a beam designed to measure the electric dipole…
The maturity of current detectors based on technologies that range from solid state to gases renewed the interest for X-ray polarimetry, raising the enthusiasm of a wide scientific community to improve the performance of polarimeters as…
Polarization measurements of the gamma-ray component of transient sources are of great scientific interest, they are however, also highly challenging. This is due to the typical low signal to noise and the potential for significant…
In very intense electromagnetic fields, the vacuum refractive index is expected to be modified due to nonlinear quantum electrodynamics (QED) properties. Several experimental tests using high intensity lasers have been proposed to observe…
Polarized neutrons are a powerful probe to investigate magnetism in condensed matter on length scales from single atomic distances to micrometers. With the ongoing advancement of neutron optics, that allow to transport beams with increased…
Experiments and their interpretation on polarization dynamics and polarization switching in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers operated in the fundamental transverse mode regime are reviewed. Important observations are switching events…
Scattering polarized electrons provides an important probe of the weak interactions. Precisely measuring the parity-violating left-right cross section asymmetry is the goal of a number of experiments recently completed or in progress. The…
The PVLAS collaboration has recently reported the observation of a rotation of the polarization plane of light propagating through a transverse static magnetic field. Such an effect can arise from the production of a light, m_A ~ meV,…
We show that the parameter space of axion-like particles can be severly constrained using high-precision measurements of quasar polarisations. Robust limits are derived from the measured bounds on optical circular polarisation and from the…
The invention of laser immediately enabled us to detect nonlinearities of photon interaction in matter, as manifested for example by Franken et al.'s detection of second harmonic generation and the excitation of the Brillouin forward…
X-ray polarimetry promises to give qualitatively new information about high-energy sources. Examples of interesting source classes are binary black hole systems, rotation and accretion powered neutron stars, Microquasars, Active Galactic…
We present a combined theoretical and experimental study of magnetic resonance transitions induced by polarization-modulated light in cesium vapor exposed to a transverse magnetic field. Signals are obtained by phase-sensitive analysis of…
The polarisation of x-ray photons can be determined by measuring the direction of emission of a K-shell photoelectron. Effective exploitation of this effect below 10 keV would allow development of a highly sensitive x-ray polarimeter…
The impact of the optical field polarization on the spectrum of magnetically-induced transitions, a class of transitions forbidden at zero magnetic field, is studied with a weak-probe sub-Doppler technique. The high spectral resolution of…
Vacuum fluctuations give rise to effective nonlinear interactions between electromagnetic fields. These generically modify the characteristics of light traversing a strong-field region. X-ray free-electron lasers constitute a particularly…
When photons propagate in vacuum they may fluctuate into matter pairs thus allowing the vacuum to be polarised. This linear effect leads to charge screening and renormalisation. When exposed to an intense background field a nonlinear effect…
Currently, a number of experiments are searching for vacuum magnetic birefringence and dichroism, i.e. for dispersive and absorptive features in the propagation of polarized light along a transverse magnetic field in vacuum. In this note we…
We study polarization effects in the nonlinear interference of photons generated via frequency non-degenerate spontaneous parametric down conversion. Signal and idler photons generated in the visible and infrared (IR) range, are split in…