Related papers: Vacuum birefringence at the Gamma Factory
We suggest an experiment to observe vacuum birefringence induced by intense laser fields. A high-intensity laser pulse is focused to ultra-relativistic intensity and polarizes the vacuum which then acts like a birefringent medium. The…
Vacuum magnetic birefringence is one of the most interesting non-linear phenomena in quantum electrodynamics because it is a pure photon-photon result of the theory and it directly signalizes the violation of the classical superposition…
Vacuum birefringence (VB), a fundamental prediction of nonlinear quantum electrodynamics (QED), has eluded direct laboratory detection due to its extreme weakness. We propose a compact, "self-probing" scheme where a GeV electron beam…
Vacuum birefringence produces a differential phase between orthogonally polarized components of a weak electromagnetic probe in the presence of a strong electromagnetic field. Despite representing a hallmark prediction of quantum…
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…
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…
Table of Contents 1. One-loop effective Lagrangian in spinor QED. 2. Dispersion effects for low-frequency photons. 3. Vacuum birefringence in magnetic fields. 4. Light cone condition, effective Lagrangian approach.
The effect of vacuum birefringence in a magnetic field generated by a laser-driven capacitor-coil generator as well as in field of an electromagnetic wave in a radioguide has been theoretically considered. The resulting ellipticity of a…
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…
Vacuum fluctuations give rise to effective nonlinear interactions between electromagnetic fields. These generically modify the characteristics of light traversing a strong-field region. X-ray free-electron lasers constitute a particularly…
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…
A new model of nonlinear electrodynamics with three parameters is suggested. The phenomena of vacuum birefringence takes place when there is the external constant magnetic field. We calculate the indices of refraction for two polarizations…
We present an in-situ method to measure the birefringence of a single vacuum window by means of microwave spectroscopy on an ensemble of cold atoms. Stress-induced birefringence can cause an ellipticity in the polarization of an initially…
We describe the principle and the status of the PVLAS experiment which is presently running at the INFN section of Ferrara, Italy, to detect the magnetic birefringence of vacuum. This is related to the QED vacuum structure and can be…
In the context of quantum electrodynamics, the decay of false vacuum leads to the production of electron-positron pair, a phenomenon known as the Schwinger effect. In practical experimental scenarios, producing a pair requires an extremely…
We use an analytic form for the Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian to calculate the birefringent and dichroic properties of the vacuum for arbitrarily strong wrenchless fields. PACS : 12.20.Ds, 42.25.Lc 97.60.Jd, 98.70.Rz
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…
We aim at insights about how localization of the background field impacts nonlinear quantum vacuum signatures probed by photons in purely magnetic, electric and crossed fields. The starting point of our study are the one-loop results for…
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 study the effect of stimulated photon emission from the vacuum in strong space-time-dependent electromagnetic fields. We emphasize the viewpoint that the vacuum subjected to macroscopic electromagnetic fields with at least one nonzero…