Related papers: All-optical Quantum Vacuum Signals in Two-Beam Col…
Quantum electrodynamics predicts the vacuum to behave as a non-linear medium, including effects such as birefringence. However, for experimentally available field strengths, this vacuum polarizability is extremely small and thus very hard…
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…
Nonlinear interactions of light with light are well known in quantum electronics, and it is quite common to generate harmonic or subharmonic beams from a primary laser with photonic crystals. One suprising result of quantum electrodynamics…
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…
The nonlinear quantum interaction of a linearly polarized x-ray probe beam with a focused intense standing laser wave is studied theoretically. Because of the tight focusing of the standing laser pulse, diffraction effects arise for the…
We study the nonlinear QED signature of x-ray vacuum diffraction in the head-on collision of optical high-intensity and x-ray free-electron laser pulses at finite spatio-temporal offsets between the laser foci. The high-intensity laser…
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…
Direct measurement of the elastic scattering of real photons on an electromagnetic field would allow the fundamental low-energy constants of quantum electrodynamics (QED) to be experimentally determined. We show that scenarios involving the…
The invention of laser immediately enabled us to detect nonlinearities of photon interaction in matter, as manifested for example by Franken et al.'s detection of second harmonic generation and the excitation of the Brillouin forward…
To probe the nonlinear effects of photon-photon interaction in the quantum electrodynamics, we study the generation of circular polarized photons by the collision of two linearly polarized laser beams. In the framework of the…
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.…
We study the effect of laser photon merging, or equivalently high harmonic generation, in the quantum vacuum subject to inhomogeneous electromagnetic fields. Such a process is facilitated by the effective nonlinear couplings arising from…
In spatially structured strong laser fields, quantum electrodynamical vacuum behaves like a nonlinear Kerr medium with modulated third-order susceptibility where new coherent nonlinear effects arise due to modulation. We consider the…
The quantum vacuum constitutes a fascinating medium of study, in particular since near-future laser facilities will be able to probe the nonlinear nature of this vacuum. There has been a large number of proposed tests of the low-energy,…
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…
The influence of the strong laser-driven vacuum on a propagating electromagnetic probe wave has been studied in detail. We investigate two scenarios comprising a focused probe laser beam passing through a region of vacuum polarised by an…
The phenomenon of electron-laser vacuum breakdown is the multiple cascade production of electron-positron pairs in head-on collision of a beam of relativistic electrons with an intense laser pulse. This effect was first predicted by the…
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…
Collision of ultra-intense optical laser and X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) pulses is a promising approach to detecting nonlinear vacuum polarization (VP), a long-standing prediction of quantum electrodynamics remaining to be tested.…
In the collision of a high-energy proton beam and a strong laser field, merging of the laser photons can occur due to the polarization of vacuum. The probability of photon merging is calculated by accounting exactly for the laser field and…