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We study the conditions required to distinguish laser-induced nonlinear quantum electrodynamics (QED) effects in vacuum from competing signals due to interactions of laser pulses with ionized residual gas. The latter is inevitably present…
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…
Free-electron lasers (FEL) in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and X-ray regime opened up the possibility for experiments at high power densities, in particular allowing for fluence-dependent absorption and scattering experiments to reveal…
In very intense electromagnetic fields, the vacuum refractive index is expected to be modified due to nonlinear quantum electrodynamics (QED) properties. Several experimental tests using high intensity lasers have been proposed to observe…
All-optical experiments at the high-intensity frontier offer a promising route to unprecedented precision tests of quantum electrodynamics in strong macroscopic electromagnetic fields. So far, most theoretical studies of all-optical…
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…
Optical signatures of the effective nonlinear couplings among electromagnetic fields in the quantum vacuum can be conveniently described in terms of stimulated photon emission processes induced by strong classical, space-time dependent…
In this paper we will show that photon-photon collision experiments using extreme lasers can provide measurable effects giving fundamental information about the essence of QED, its Lagrangian. A possible scenario with two counterpropagating…
Laser pulse collisions are a promising tool for the investigation of light-by-light scattering phenomena induced by quantum vacuum fluctuations. Using the numerical code based on the vacuum emission picture and put forward in Blinne et al.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Studies of nonlinear quantum vacuum signals often model the driving laser fields as paraxial beams. This in particular holds for analytic approaches. While this allows for reliable predictions in most situations, there are also notable…
The advent of isolated and intense sub-femtosecond X-ray pulses enables tracking of quantummechanical motion of electrons in molecules and solids. The combination of X-ray spectroscopy and diffraction imaging is a powerful approach to…
A nonlinear interaction between photons is observed in a process that involves charge sources. To observe this process in a vacuum, there are a growing number of theoretical and experimental studies. This process may contain exotic…
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…
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…
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 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…