Related papers: Probing vacuum birefringence using x-ray free elec…
The focus of this article is on providing compact analytical expressions for the differential number of polarization flipped signal photons constituting the signal of vacuum birefringence in the head-on collision of x-ray free electron…
It is well-known that the Heisenberg-Euler-Schwinger effective Lagrangian predicts that a vacuum with a strong static electromagnetic field turns birefringent. We propose a scheme that can be implemented at the planned FCC-ee, to measure…
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…
Recent ultra-intense lasers of subcritical fields and proposed observations of the x-rays polarization from highly magnetized neutron stars of supercritical fields have attracted attention to vacuum birefringence, a unique feature of…
Quantum field theory predicts a nonlinear response of the vacuum to strong electromagnetic fields of macroscopic extent. This fundamental tenet has remained experimentally challenging and is yet to be tested in the laboratory. A…
The appearance of unconventional vacuum properties in intense fields has long been an active field of research. In this paper the vacuum polarization effect is investigated via a pump probe scheme of a probe light propagating in the vacuum…
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…
We study the nonlinear QED signature of x-ray vacuum diffraction in the head-on collision of optical high-intensity and x-ray free-electron laser pulses at finite spatio-temporal offsets between the laser foci. The high-intensity laser…
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…
Quantum electrodynamics predicts that the quantum vacuum is birefringent, but due to the very small cross-section this is yet to be confirmed by experiment. Vacuum birefringence arises as the elastic part of photon-photon scattering; the…
We consider birefringent (i.e., polarization changing) scattering of x-ray photons at the superposition of two optical laser beams of ultra-high intensity and study the resonant contributions of axions or axion-like particles, which could…
Nonlinear optics experiments measuring phase shifts induced in a weak probe pulse by a strong pump pulse must account for coherent effects that only occur when the pump and probe pulses are temporally overlapped. It is well known that a…
We propose a measurement of laser-induced vacuum birefringence through the use of pulsed lasers coupled to femtosecond optical enhancement cavities. This measurement technique features cavity-enhanced pump and probe pulses, as well as an…
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…
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…
These notes provide a pedagogical introduction to the theoretical study of vacuum polarization effects in strong electromagnetic fields as provided by state-of-the-art high-intensity lasers. Quantum vacuum fluctuations give rise to…
The fundamental theory of quantum electrodynamics predicts the vacuum to resemble a polarizable medium. This gives rise to effective nonlinear interactions between electromagnetic fields and light-by-light scattering phenomena. We study the…
When photons propagate in vacuum they may fluctuate into matter pairs thus allowing the vacuum to be polarised. This linear effect leads to charge screening and renormalisation. When exposed to an intense background field a nonlinear effect…
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…
The influence of the strong laser-driven vacuum on a propagating electromagnetic probe wave has been studied in detail. We investigate two scenarios comprising a focused probe laser beam passing through a region of vacuum polarised by an…