Related papers: Measuring Vacuum Polarisation with High Power Lase…
Collision of ultra-intense optical laser and X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) pulses is a promising approach to detecting nonlinear vacuum polarization (VP), a long-standing prediction of quantum electrodynamics remaining to be tested.…
We put forward a concrete experimental setup allowing to measure light-by-light scattering in the collision of two optical high-intensity laser beams at state-of-the-art high-field facilities operating petawatt class laser systems. Our…
Photons impinging on strong electromagnetic fields can change both momentum and helicity state, due to quantum vacuum polarisation. We investigate these effects in the collision of photons with impulsive PP-waves, which describe e.g. the…
The degree of polarization of a quantum state can be defined as its Hilbert-Schmidt distance to the set of unpolarized states. We demonstrate that the states optimizing this degree for a fixed average number of photons $\bar{N}$ present a…
The invention of the laser immediately enabled the detection of nonlinear photon-matter interactions, as manifested for example by Franken et al.'s detection of second-harmonic generation. With the recent advancement in high-power,…
We investigate quantum electrodynamic effects under the influence of an external, time-dependent electromagnetic field, which mediates dynamic modifications of the radiative corrections. Specifically, we consider the quantum electrodynamic…
We consider strong-field effects in laboratory and astrophysical plasmas and high intensity laser and cavity systems. Current state-of-the-art laser facilities are close to reaching energy scales at which quantum electrodynamics will play a…
In this report we show that vacuum is a nonlinear optical medium and we discuss what are the optical phenomena that should exist in the framework of the standard model of particle physics. We pay special attention to the low energy limit.…
The measurements of the linear polarisation of visible light from quasars give strong evidence for large-scale coherent orientations of their polarisation vectors in some regions of the sky. We show that these observations can be explained…
Vacuum polarization (VP) is investigated for the interaction of a polarized $\gamma$-ray beam of GeV photons with a counterpropagating ultraintense laser pulse. In a conventional setup of a vacuum birefringence measurement, a VP signal is…
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…
We present measurements of hard x-rays in the 50-300 keV range from copper plasmas produced by 100 fs, 806 nm laser pulses at a peak intensity ~ 1016 W cm-2. Surface roughness, even at the tens of nanometer level, is shown to influence the…
Accessing the polarization of photon allows to understand the mechanisms behind its emission or scattering, revealing much about a peculiar environment or a probed object. For energy above $\sim$10~MeV, the pair production dominates the…
We show that photons subject to a spatially inhomogeneous electromagnetic field can experience quantum reflection. Based on this observation, we propose quantum reflection as a novel means to probe the nonlinearity of the quantum vacuum in…
We outline a general formalism for treating vacuum polarization phenomena within an effective field expansion. The coupling between source charges and virtual fields is examined from the perspectives of electrostatic potentials, induced…
The process of photon splitting, becomes allowed in the presence of strong magnetic field. We calculate the influence of magnetized plasma on the photon splitting absorption coefficient. We calculate the refraction coefficients and…
We study vacuum polarization due to strong fields, in the presence of an electron-positron plasma. For this purpose, we expand quantum kinetic equations using weak fields and slow temporal scales as expansion parameters. It is demonstrated…
We use holographic methods to show that photons emitted by a strongly coupled plasma subject to a magnetic field are linearly polarized regardless of their four-momentum, except when they propagate along the field direction. The…
Vacuum birefringence produces a differential phase between orthogonally polarized components of a weak electromagnetic probe in the presence of a strong electromagnetic field. Despite representing a hallmark prediction of quantum…
Polarization characteristics of the gamma beam obtained by the Compton back scattering of laser photons on high energy electrons are evaluated by Monte-Carlo simulations. It is assumed that outgoing photons are tagged; the energy dispersion…