Related papers: The Discovery Potential of Laser Polarization Expe…
Possible extensions of the standard model of elementary particle physics suggest the existence of particles with small, unquantized electric charge. Photon initiated pair production of millicharged fermions in an external magnetic field…
A long-standing prediction of quantum electrodynamics, yet to be experimentally observed, is the interaction between real photons in vacuum. As a consequence of this interaction, the vacuum is expected to become birefringent and dichroic if…
The photon polarization tensor is the central building block of an effective theory description of photon propagation in the quantum vacuum. It accounts for the vacuum fluctuations of the underlying theory, and in the presence of external…
Recently the PVLAS collaboration reported the observation of a rotation of linearly polarized laser light induced by a transverse magnetic field - a signal being unexpected within standard QED. Two mechanisms have been proposed to explain…
Absorption and dispersion of probe photons in the field of a high-intensity circularly polarized laser wave are investigated. The optical theorem is applied for determining the absorption coefficients in terms of the imaginary part of the…
In the present study, we consider the effects of vacuum birefringence and dichroism in strong electromagnetic fields. According to quantum electrodynamics, the vacuum state exhibits different refractive properties depending on the probe…
Conventional indirect dark matter (DM) searches look for an excess in the electromagnetic emission from the sky that cannot be attributed to known astrophysical sources, but its polarisation has not been explored to date. In this…
In a recent paper it is claimed that vacuum birefringence has been experimentally observed for the first time by measuring the degree of polarization of visible light from a Magnetar candidate, a neutron star with a magnetic field…
We discuss the experimental techniques used to date for measuring the changes in polarization state of a laser produced by a strong transverse magnetic field acting in a vacuum. We point out the likely artifacts that can arise in such…
We study modulation-free methods for producing sub-Doppler, dispersive line shapes for laser stabilization near the potassium D2 transitions at 767 nm. Polarization spectroscopy is performed and a comparison is made between the use of a…
Vacuum polarization is numerically investigated for the interaction between a GeV electron beam and a counterpropagating ultraintense laser pulse in the quantum radiation dominated-regime (QRDR). We identify a signal of vacuum polarization…
This paper considers the problem of modeling the light polarization that emerges from an astrophysical plasma composed of atoms whose excitation state is significantly influenced by the anisotropy of the incident radiation field. In…
The study of anomalous electromagnetic emission in the sky is the basis of indirect searches for dark matter. It is also a powerful tool to constrain the radiative decay of active neutrinos. Until now, quantitative analyses have focused on…
It is common practice to take for granted the equality (up to the constant $\varepsilon_0$) of the electric displacement ($\bf{D}$) and electric ($\bf{E}$) field vectors in vacuum. The same happens with the magnetic field ($\bf{H}$) and the…
When exposed to intense electromagnetic fields, the quantum vacuum is expected to exhibit properties of a polarisable medium akin to a weakly nonlinear dielectric material. Various schemes have been proposed to measure such vacuum…
Dichroic tomography is a 3D imaging technique in which the polarization of the incident beam is used to induce contrast due to the magnetization or orientation of a sample. The aim is to reconstruct not only the optical density but the…
The measurement of vacuum polarisation effects, in particular vacuum birefringence, using combined optical and x-ray laser pulses is now actively pursued. Here we briefly examine the feasibility of two alternative setups. The first utilises…
Vacuum polarization, an effect predicted nearly 70 years ago, is still yet to be directly detected despite significant experimental effort. Previous attempts have made use of large liquid-helium cooled electromagnets which inadvertently…
Laser-based searches of the yet unobserved vacuum birefringence might be sensitive for very light hypothetical particles carrying a tiny fraction of the electron charge. We show that, with the help of contemporary techniques, polarimetric…
The polarization of light is a critically under-utilized, rich source of information in astronomy. For stars in particular, surface magnetism polarization that can be detected and measured with spectro-polarimetry. Many questions about…