Related papers: Prospects for studying vacuum polarisation using d…
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…
Polarized light microscopy provides unique opportunities for analyzing the molecular order in man-made and natural materials, including biological structures inside living cells, tissues, and whole organisms. 20 years ago, the LC-PolScope…
Circularly polarized colliding laser pulses can create abundant electron-positron pair plasma [A. R. Bell and J. G. Kirk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 200403 (2008)], which scattering the incoming electromagnetic waves can prevent them from…
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…
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 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…
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.…
This paper describes the demonstration of linearly polarized picosecond pulse shaping with variable profiles including symmetric and non-symmetric intensity distributions. Important characteristics such as stability and transmission were…
In this paper we propose an all-optical vacuum birefringence experiment and evaluate its feasibility for various scenarios. Many petawatt-class lasers became operational and many more are expected to enter operation in the near future,…
We derive a simple expression for the photon helicity and polarisation-flip probabilities in arbitrary background fields, in the low energy regime. Taking the background to model a focused laser beam, we study the impact of pulse shape and…
We present a setup for highly polarized proton beams using two parallel propagating laser pulses that have a carrier envelope phase difference of $\pi$. This mechanism is examined utilizing particle-in-cell simulations and compared to a…
The growing use of ultrashort laser pulses exhibiting time-varying polarization (vector pulses) demands simple and robust characterization techniques capable to perform measurements in a broad range of experimental and environmental…
A recent proposal to explore vacuum electrodynamics using the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic pulse through an ambient constant magnetic field is examined. It is argued that the proposal should be modified so that the background…
It is known that polar ice is birefringent and that this can have implications for in-ice radio detection of ultra-high energy neutrinos. Previous investigations of the effects of birefringence on the propagation of radio-frequency signals…
We review the state of the art for measuring the X-ray polarization of neutron stars. We discuss how valuable precision measurements of the degree and position angle of polarization as a function of energy and, where relevant, of pulse…
Photon splitting due to vacuum polarization in a laser field is considered. Using an operator technique, we derive the amplitudes for arbitrary strength, spectral content and polarization of the laser field. The case of a monochromatic…
Birefringence phenomena stemming from vacuum polarization are revisited in the framework of coherent scattering. Based on photon-photon scattering, our analysis brings out the direct connection between this process and vacuum birefringence.…
It is shown that well collimated mono-energetic ion beams with a large particle number can be generated in the hole-boring radiation pressure acceleration regime by using an elliptically polarized laser pulse with appropriate theoretically…
The PVLAS experiment operates an ellipsometer which embraces a superconducting dipole magnet and can measure ellipticity and rotation induced by the magnetic field onto linearly polarized light. The sensitivity of the instrument is about…
A theoretical study of laser and plasma based electron acceleration is presented. An effective model has been used, in which the presence of an underdense plasma has been taken account via its index of refraction $n_{m}$. In the confines of…