Related papers: Vacuum birefringence detection in all-optical scen…
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…
In Quantum Electrodynamics, vacuum becomes a nonlinear optical medium: its optical index should be modified in the presence of intense external electromagnetic fields. The DeLLight project (Deflection of Light by Light) aims to observe this…
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 show that extreme vacuum pressures can be measured with current technology by detecting the photons produced by the relativistic Thomson scattering of ultra-intense laser light by the electrons of the medium. We compute the amount of…
Accelerating particles to relativistic energies over very short distances using lasers has been a long standing goal in physics. Among the various schemes proposed for electrons, vacuum laser acceleration has attracted considerable interest…
The interaction of a weak probe laser with an inverted-Y type four-level atomic system driven by two additional coherent fields is investigated theoretically. Under the influence of the coherent coupling fields, the steady-state linear…
We present the current status of the BMV experiment. Our apparatus is based on an up-to-date resonant optical cavity coupled to a transverse magnetic field. We detail our data acquisition and analysis procedure which takes into account the…
We present an all-optical concept for measuring the electric field of light spanning from infrared to extreme ultraviolet with multi-petahertz detection bandwidth. Our approach employs a heterodyne detection of light produced by a highly…
A scheme for fast, compact, and controllable acceleration of heavy particles in vacuum is proposed, in which two counterpropagating lasers with variable frequencies drive a beat-wave structure with variable phase velocity, thus allowing for…
Atom interferometry is the most successful technique for precision metrology. However, current interferometers using ultracold atoms allows one to probe the interference pattern only momentarily and has finite duty cycle, resulting in an…
The aim of the DeLLight (Deflection of Light by Light) experiment is to observe for the first time the optical nonlinearity in vacuum, as predicted by Quantum Electrodynamics, by measuring the refraction of a low-intensity focused laser…
We report a robust method of stabilizing a laser to the frequency of an atomic transition using a hollow cathode lamp. In contrast to the standard dichroic atomic vapor laser lock (DAVLL) method, which uses dichroism induced by a…
Squeezed vacuum, a fundamental resource for continuous-variable quantum information processing, has been used to demonstrate quantum advantages in sensing, communication, and computation. While most experiments use homodyne detection to…
Nonlinear effects in vacuum have been predicted but never observed yet directly. The PVLAS collaboration has long been working on an apparatus aimed at detecting such effects by measuring vacuum magnetic birefringence. Unfortunately the…
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,…
A new theoretical framework to describe the experimental advances in electro-optic detection of broadband quantum states, specifically the quantum vacuum, is devised. By making use of fundamental concepts from quantum field theory on…
We present the first successful trapping of single erbium atoms in an array of optical tweezers. Using a single narrow-line optical transition, we achieve deep cooling for direct tweezer loading, pairwise ejection, and continous imaging…
Optically levitated nanoparticles in vacuum provide a highly sensitive platform for probing weak light-matter interactions. In this work, we present an interference-based method to amplify the optical force exerted by a weak field on a…
The advent of Petawatt-class laser systems allows generating electro-magnetic fields of unprecedented strength in a controlled environment, driving increasingly more efforts to probe yet unobserved processes through their interaction with…
A natural approach to measure the time of arrival of an atom at a spatial region is to illuminate this region with a laser and detect the first fluorescence photons produced by the excitation of the atom and subsequent decay. We investigate…