Related papers: A proposal for testing subcritical vacuum pair pro…
In this paper we will show that photon-photon collision experiments using extreme lasers can provide measurable effects giving fundamental information about the essence of QED, its Lagrangian. A possible scenario with two counterpropagating…
We explore theories of dark matter in which dark matter annihilations produce mono-energetic gamma rays ("lines") in the context of effective field theory, which captures the physics for cases in which the particles mediating the…
Quantum field theory predicts the vacuum to exhibit a non-linear response to strong electromagnetic fields. This fundamental tenet has remained experimentally challenging and is yet to be tested in the laboratory. We present proof of…
A quantum kinetic equation coupled with Maxwell's equation is used to estimate the laser power required at an XFEL facility to expose intrinsically quantum effects in the process of QED vacuum decay via spontaneous pair production. A 9…
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…
A theory is proposed to explain with simplicity the basic observed properties of a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB). It employs a well-known result of Schwinger, that static electric fields in excess of a critical value are unstable to pair creation,…
We give an exact, analytic, and manifestly gauge invariant account of pair production in combined longitudinal and transverse electromagnetic fields, both depending arbitrarily on lightfront time. The instantaneous, nonperturbative…
We calculate the rate for pair production of light pseudoscalars by strong inhomogeneous and static electric (magnetic) fields. We show that, in the case of axions, the stability of atoms over cosmic lifetimes is jeopardised unless the…
Gamma-rays from pulsars can be efficiently attenuated in their magnetospheres via the mechanism of single-photon pair production and also the exotic QED process of photon splitting, which become prolific in fields approaching the quantum…
We consider a model for neutralino dark matter candidates arising in anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking schemes, and examine its testability through the search for exotic cosmic rays produced by neutralino pair annihilations in the…
We study the electron-positron pair production process in strong background electric fields with spatio-temporal inhomogeneity in the time-dependent Basis Light-front Quantization approach. We calculate the observables such as the invariant…
All-optical experiments at the high-intensity frontier offer a promising route to unprecedented precision tests of quantum electrodynamics in strong macroscopic electromagnetic fields. So far, most theoretical studies of all-optical…
Quantum electrodynamics predicts the vacuum to behave as a non-linear medium, including effects such as birefringence. However, for experimentally available field strengths, this vacuum polarizability is extremely small and thus very hard…
We investigate electron-positron pair production in pulse-shaped electric background fields using a non-Markovian quantum kinetic equation. We identify a pulse-length range for subcritical fields still in the nonperturbative regime where…
It is well known that in the presence of strong external electromagnetic fields many processes forbidden in standard QED become possible. One example is the one-photon annihilation process considered recently by the present authors in the…
Our goal is to study optical signatures of quantum vacuum nonlinearities in strong macroscopic electromagnetic fields provided by high-intensity laser beams. The vacuum emission scheme is perfectly suited for this task as it naturally…
The ability of an intense laser pulse to propagate in a classically over-critical plasma through the phenomenon of relativistic transparency is shown to facilitate the generation of strong plasma magnetic fields. Particle-in-cell…
In some models of $\gamma$-ray bursts super-strong electric fields ($E\sim 10^{14} {\rm statvolt cm}^{-1}$) have been surmized. Such large fields may provide copious pair production through vacuum polarization. Here we examine various…
We explore scenarios where the highest energy cosmic rays are produced by new particle physics near the grand unification scale. Using detailed numerical simulations of extragalactic nucleon, gamma-ray, and neutrino propagation, we show the…
We calculate the flux of cosmic gamma rays expected {}from the annihilation of neutralinos in the Galactic halo. Our calculation of the annihilation cross section to two photons improves the existing calculations by inclusion of exact…