Related papers: Magnetars as Laboratories for Strong Field QED
Neutron stars have inferred surface magnetic fields of up to 10^{14} Gauss, in the case of radio pulsars, and up to possibly 10^{15} Gauss, in the case of Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters and Anomalous X-ray Pulsars. In fields this high, QED…
The vacuum polarization tensor in strong external magnetic fields has been evaluated numerically for various strengths of magnetic fields and momenta of photons under the threshold of the $e^{\pm}$ pair creation. The fitting formula has…
An electron-positron pair ($e^- e^+$) is created in vacuum above a critical electric field strength $E_{crt}$ which is quite large in the laboratory scale. The photon, thus the field, annihilates in the pair creation process. Here, we…
Processes occurring in the strong-field regime of QED are characterized by background electromagnetic fields of the order of the critical field $F_{cr}=m^2c^3/\hbar|e|$ in the rest frame of participating charges. It has been conjectured…
Solutions of a kinetic equation are investigated which describe, on a nonperturbative basis, the vacuum creation of quasiparticle electron-positron pairs due to a strong laser field. The dependence of the quasiparticle electron (positron)…
Strong magnetic fields are commonly generated in off-central relativistic heavy-ion collisions in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab and in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and have been used to probe the…
In a previous paper we showed how higher-order strong-field-QED processes in long laser pulses can be approximated by multiplying sequences of "strong-field Mueller matrices". We obtained expressions that are valid for arbitrary field shape…
A next generation of Compton and pair telescopes that improve MeV-band detection sensitivity by more than a decade beyond current instrumental capabilities will open up new insights into a variety of astrophysical source classes. Among…
The common tunneling picture of electron-positron pair creation in a strong electric field is generalized to pair creation in combined crossed electric and magnetic fields. This enhanced picture, being symmetric for electrons and positrons,…
We show a possibility that strong ``magnetic field'' $\sim 10^{15} $G is produced by color ferromagnetic quark matter in neutron stars. In the quark matter a color magnetic field is generated spontaneously owing to Savvidy mechanism and a…
Since the work of Sauter, and Heisenberg, Euler and K\"ockel, it has been understood that vacuum polarization effects in quantum electrodynamics (QED) predict remarkable new phenomena such as light-light scattering and pair production from…
Electron-positron pair production in strong electric fields, i.e., the Sauter-Schwinger effect, is studied using the real-time Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism. Hereby, the electric field is modeled to be a homogeneous, single-pulse field…
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…
In the presence of strong magnetic fields near pulsars, the QED vacuum becomes a birefringent medium due to nonlinear QED interactions. Here, we explore the impact of the effective photon-photon interaction on the polarization evolution of…
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.
Magnetars are surrounded by diffuse plasma in magnetic field strengths well above the quantum electrodynamic critical value. We derive equations of "quantum force-free electrodynamics" for this plasma using effective field theory arguments.…
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…
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…
Extremely strong magnetic fields change the vacuum index of refraction. This induces a lensing effect that is not unlike the lensing phenomenon in strong gravitational fields. The main difference between the two is the polarization…
Magnetic field usually leads to a polarization of electron spins. It is shown that in a system of {\em strongly interacting} particles applying magnetic field may lead to an opposite effect -- depolarization of electron spins. Results of…