Related papers: Polarimetry for measuring the vacuum magnetic bire…
QED vacuum can be polarized and magnetized by an external electromagnetic field, therefore acting as a birefringent medium. This effect has not yet been measured. In this paper, after having recalled the main facts concerning Vacuum…
A new experiment to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence (VMB), the OVAL experiment, is reported. We developed an original pulsed magnet that has a high repetition rate and applies the strongest magnetic field among VMB experiments. The…
Vacuum magnetic birefringence (VMB) is an effect predicted by quantum electrodynamics, in which the vacuum behaves as a non-linear optical medium and exhibit a birefringence in the presence of a magnetic field. In this work, an…
In a recent paper it is claimed that vacuum birefringence has been experimentally observed for the first time by measuring the degree of polarization of visible light from a Magnetar candidate, a neutron star with a magnetic field…
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…
A novel polarisation modulation scheme for polarimeters based on Fabry-Perot cavities is presented. The application to the proposed HERA-X experiment aiming to measuring the magnetic birefringence of vacuum with the HERA superconducting…
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…
We discuss the experimental techniques used to date for measuring the changes in polarization state of a laser produced by a strong transverse magnetic field acting in a vacuum. We point out the likely artifacts that can arise in such…
We propose a novel statistical method to measure cosmic birefringence and demonstrate its power in probing parity violation due to axions. Exploiting an empirical correlation between the integrated radio polarization direction of a spiral…
In this work we present data characterizing the sensitivity of the Bir\'{e}fringence Magnetique du Vide (BMV) instrument. BMV is an experiment attempting to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence (VMB) via the measurement of an ellipticity…
In this contribution we present the status of the BMV experiment whose goal is to measure the vacuum magnetic birefringence.
Although experimental efforts have been active for about 30 years now, a direct laboratory observation of vacuum magnetic birefringence, an effect due to vacuum fluctuations, still needs confirmation. Indeed, the predicted birefringence of…
We introduce a laser heterodyne polarimeter designed for the precision measurement of sub $\mu\mathrm{rad}$ differential phase shifts due to birefringence. The polarimeter will be used in an initial testbed for a potential future vacuum…
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…
Polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can probe new parity-violating physics such as cosmic birefringence (CB), which requires exquisite control over instrumental systematics. The non-idealities of the half-wave plate (HWP)…
Probing vacuum structures deformed by high intense fields is of great interest in general. In the context of quantum electrodynamics (QED), the vacuum exposed by a linearly polarized high-intensity laser field is expected to show…
The most accessible method to measure polarization features of the CMB radiation is by means of a Stokes Polarimeter based on the rotation of an Half Wave Plate. The current observational cosmology is starting to be limited by the presence…
Vacuum polarization, an effect predicted nearly 70 years ago, is still yet to be directly detected despite significant experimental effort. Previous attempts have made use of large liquid-helium cooled electromagnets which inadvertently…
The PVLAS collaboration is presently assembling a new apparatus (at the INFN section of Ferrara, Italy) to detect vacuum magnetic birefringence (VMB). VMB is related to the structure of the QED vacuum and is predicted by the…
The observed pattern of linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons is a sensitive probe of physics violating parity symmetry under inversion of spatial coordinates. A new parity-violating interaction might have…