Related papers: Vacuum birefringence in strong inhomogeneous elect…
Ninety years after their prediction, quantum vacuum nonlinearities in macroscopic electromagnetic fields still await a direct experimental verification in the laboratory. A particularly promising route towards their first measurement is the…
We explore the perspectives of studying vacuum birefringence at the Gamma Factory. To this end, we assess in detail the parameter regime which can be reliably analyzed resorting to the leading contribution to the Heisenberg-Euler effective…
Vacuum birefringence is governed by the amplitude for a photon to flip helicity or polarisation state in an external field. Here we calculate the flip and non-flip amplitudes in arbitrary plane wave backgrounds, along with the induced…
We show that a laser beam can be diffracted by a more concentrated light pulse due to quantum vacuum effects. We compute analytically the intensity pattern in a realistic experimental configuration, and discuss how it can be used to measure…
In a recent paper, we have shown that the QED nonlinear corrections imply a phase correction to the linear evolution of crossing electromagnetic waves in vacuum. Here, we provide a more complete analysis, including a full numerical solution…
A nonlinear interaction between photons is observed in a process that involves charge sources. To observe this process in a vacuum, there are a growing number of theoretical and experimental studies. This process may contain exotic…
In this paper we represent nonperturbative calculation for one-loop Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) vacuum birefringence in presence of strong magnetic field. The dispersion relations for electromagnetic wave propagating in strong magnetic…
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…
The focus of these lectures is on the quantum vacuum subjected to classical electromagnetic fields. To this end we explicitly derive the renowned Heisenberg-Euler effective action in constant electromagnetic fields in a rather pedagogical…
We consider signals of photon-photon scattering in laser-based, low energy experiments. In particular, we consider the ellipticity induced on a probe beam by a strong background field, and compare it with a recent worldline expression for…
We study the circular birefringence experienced by linearly polarised photons colliding with a circularly polarised background creating a vacuum of definite chirality (handedness). For this scenario the standard Heisenberg-Euler approach…
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…
The nonlinear quantum interaction of a linearly polarized x-ray probe beam with a focused intense standing laser wave is studied theoretically. Because of the tight focusing of the standing laser pulse, diffraction effects arise for the…
One of the main features of nonlinear electrodynamics (NED) is the existence of an effective geometry that describes the geodesic motion of photons. A detailed analysis of the properties of effective geometry is of utmost importance for a…
Photons propagating in strong magnetic fields are subject to a phenomenon called the "vacuum birefringence" where refractive indices of two physical modes both deviate from unity and are different from each other. We compute the vacuum…
The effect of vacuum birefringence in a magnetic field generated by a laser-driven capacitor-coil generator as well as in field of an electromagnetic wave in a radioguide has been theoretically considered. The resulting ellipticity of a…
We study the optic control for birefringence of a polarized light by an atomic ensemble with a tripod configuration, which is mediated by the electromagnetically induced transparency with a spatially inhomogeneous laser. The atom ensemble…
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…
The quantum vacuum constitutes a fascinating medium of study, in particular since near-future laser facilities will be able to probe the nonlinear nature of this vacuum. There has been a large number of proposed tests of the low-energy,…
We reconsider the recently proposed nonlinear QED effect of quantum reflection of photons off an inhomogeneous strong-field region. We present new results for strong fields varying both in space and time. While such configurations can give…