Related papers: Strongly Magnetized Sources: QED and X-ray Polariz…
The photon vacuum polarization effect in curved spacetime leads to birefringence, i.e. the photon velocity becomes greater than (or less than) the speed of light depending on its polarization. We investigate this phenomenon in a…
The influence of quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field on the propagation of a polarized light wave in a nonlinear dielectric is investigated. It is shown that in some cases, the fluctuations couple to the optical nonlinearities…
The polarization direction of an electromagnetic field changes and eventually reaches a steady state when propagating through a birefringent material with off axis absorption or gain. The steady state orientation direction depends on the…
We calculate the vacuum polarization-induced ellipticity acquired by a linearly polarized laser beam of angular frequency $\bar \omega$ on traversing a region containing a transverse magnetic field rotating with a small angular velocity…
The spontaneous generation of axial vacuum current and corresponding magnetic field with multipole structure, caused by the supercritical Coulomb source with charge $Z$ and size $R$, is explored in essentially non-perturbative approach with…
In the atmospheric plasma of a strongly magnetized neutron star, vacuum polarization can induce a Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein like resonance across which a X-ray photon may (depending on its energy) convert from one mode into the other,…
Cosmological Birefringence (CB) is a phenomenon, caused by parity violating modifications to electrodynamics, whereby the linear polarisation angle of light changes as photons traverse a vacuum. It is possible to use a number of different…
We propose a novel technique that promises hope of being the first to directly detect a polarization in the quantum electrodynamic (QED) vacuum. The technique is based upon the use of ultra-short pulses of light circulating in low…
A long-standing prediction of quantum electrodynamics, yet to be experimentally observed, is the interaction between real photons in vacuum. As a consequence of this interaction, the vacuum is expected to become birefringent and dichroic if…
We present a theoretical study of radiative transfer in strongly magnetized electron-ion plasmas, focusing on the effect of vacuum polarization due to quantum electrodynamics. This study is directly relevant to thermal radiation from the…
Optical rectification of intense, circularly polarized light penetrating a material generates a static magnetic field aligned with the light's direction and proportional to its intensity. Recent experiments have unveiled a substantial,…
In a Poynting-flux-dominated (PFD) jet that exhibits an ordered magnetic field, a transition towards turbulence and magnetic disorder follows after magnetic reconnection and energy dissipation during the prompt emission phase. In this…
Wave propagation properties in a medium are fundamentally affected when this medium is moving instead of at rest. In isotropic dielectric media rotation has two noteworthy contributions: one is a mechanically induced circular birefringence…
We review the methods used to test for the existence of cosmological birefringence, i.e. a rotation of the plane of linear polarization for electromagnetic radiation traveling over cosmological distances, which might arise in a number of…
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…
In vacuum high-intensity lasers can cause photon-photon interaction via the process of virtual vacuum polarization which may be measured by the phase velocity shift of photons across intense fields. In the optical frequency domain, the…
Highly magnetized neutron stars exhibit the vacuum non-linear electrodynamics effects, which can be well described using the one-loop effective action for quantum electrodynamics. In this context, we study the propagation and polarization…
We consider the polarization characteristics of the electromagnetic (EM) counterpart of the gravitational wave (GW) created by coalescence of the binary sources. Here, we explore the impact of the photon-graviton interaction on the…
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…
Magnetic reconnection is one of the prime candidate mechanisms that may energize the plasma emitting the strongly polarized X-ray emission from black hole X-ray binaries (BHXRBs) in their hard states. The mechanism requires strong magnetic…