Related papers: Photon propagation in slowly varying electromagnet…
Starting from the Heisenberg-Euler effective Lagrangian, we determine the photon current and photon polarization tensor in inhomogeneous, slowly varying electromagnetic fields. To this end, we consider background field configurations…
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…
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 derive analytical expressions for the photon polarization tensor in circularly polarized Hermite- and Laguerre-Gaussian beams, complementing the corresponding results for linearly polarized beams obtained recently. As they are based upon…
The effect of static electromagnetic fields on the propagation of light is analyzed in the context of a particular class of scalar-tensor gravitational theories. It is found that for appropriate field configurations and light polarization,…
We investigate photon merging and splitting processes in inhomogeneous, slowly varying electromagnetic fields. Our study is based on the three-photon polarization tensor following from the Heisenberg-Euler effective action. We put special…
Upcoming high-intensity laser systems will be able to probe the quantum-induced nonlinear regime of electrodynamics. So far unobserved QED phenomena such as the discovery of a nonlinear response of the quantum vacuum to macroscopic…
In this work, a constant and uniform magnetic field is less than the Schwinger critical value. In turn, an additional constant and uniform electric field is taken much smaller than the magnetic field value. The propagation of a photon in…
In this article, we provide analytical expressions for the photon polarization tensor in pulsed Hermite- and Laguerre-Gaussian laser beams. Our results are based on a locally constant field approximation of the one-loop Heisenberg-Euler…
The scattering of photons off photons at the one-loop level is investigated. We give a short review of the weak field limit, as given by the first order term in the series expansion of the Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian. The dispersion…
In this paper we study the polarization tensor of photons in a QED plasma in the presence of a magnetic field. We do it both at vanishing and at finite temperature. We use two different methods to compute the polarization tensor components…
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…
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…
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…
Using thermal field theory, we derive simple analytic expressions for the spectral density of photons in degenerate QED plasmas, without assuming the usual non or ultra-relativistic limit. We recover the standard results in both cases.…
We revisit the photon polarization tensor in a homogeneous external magnetic or electric field. The starting point of our considerations is the momentum space representation of the one-loop photon polarization tensor in the presence of a…
We study the effect of laser photon merging, or equivalently high harmonic generation, in the quantum vacuum subject to inhomogeneous electromagnetic fields. Such a process is facilitated by the effective nonlinear couplings arising from…
The nonlinear propagation of intense incoherent photons in a photon gas is considered. The photon-photon interactions are governed by a pair of equations comprising a wave-kinetic equation for the incoherent photons in the presence of the…
We review the theory for photon-photon scattering in vacuum, and some of the proposals for its experimental search, including the results of our recent works on the subject. We then describe a very simple and sensitive proposal of an…
We study all-optical signatures of the effective nonlinear couplings among electromagnetic fields in the quantum vacuum, using the collision of two focused high-intensity laser pulses as an example. The experimental signatures of quantum…