Related papers: Vacuum polarization effects in the background of a…
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…
In the present study, we consider the effects of vacuum birefringence and dichroism in strong electromagnetic fields. According to quantum electrodynamics, the vacuum state exhibits different refractive properties depending on the probe…
The photon vacuum polarization effect in curved spacetime leads to birefringence, i.e. the photon velocity becomes greater than (or less than) the speed of light depending on its polarization. We investigate this phenomenon in a…
Geometric optics effectively describes the propagation of electromagnetic waves when the wavelength is much smaller than the characteristic length scale of the medium, making wave phenomena like diffraction negligible. As a result, light…
In vacuum high-intensity lasers can cause photon-photon interaction via the process of virtual vacuum polarization which may be measured by the phase velocity shift of photons across intense fields. In the optical frequency domain, the…
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 response of the QED vacuum in an asymptotically large electromagnetic field is studied. In this regime the vacuum energy is strongly influenced by the vacuum polarization effect. The possible interaction between the virtual…
Vacuum polarization in QED in a background gravitational field induces interactions which {\it effectively} modify the classical picture of light rays, as the null geodesics of spacetime. These interactions violate the strong equivalence…
Birefringence is one of the fascinating properties of the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in strong electromagnetic fields. The scattering of linearly polarized incident probe photons into a perpendicularly polarized mode provides a…
The effect of vacuum birefringence is one of the first predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED): the presence of a charged Dirac field makes the vacuum birefringent when threaded by magnetic fields. This effect, extremely weak for…
Photons impinging on strong electromagnetic fields can change both momentum and helicity state, due to quantum vacuum polarisation. We investigate these effects in the collision of photons with impulsive PP-waves, which describe e.g. the…
We consider signals of photon-photon scattering in laser-based, low energy experiments. In particular, we consider the ellipticity induced on a probe beam by a strong background field, and compare it with a recent worldline expression for…
The photon polarization tensor is the central building block of an effective theory description of photon propagation in the quantum vacuum. It accounts for the vacuum fluctuations of the underlying theory, and in the presence of external…
We study polarization dependent photon propagation in static, spherically symmetric spacetimes permeated by strong magnetic fields, with the aim of quantifying how finite emission and detection radii modify vacuum birefringence signals.…
Birefringence phenomena stemming from vacuum polarization are revisited in the framework of coherent scattering. Based on photon-photon scattering, our analysis brings out the direct connection between this process and vacuum birefringence.…
The dispersive effects of vacuum polarization on the propagation of a strong circularly polarized electromagnetic wave through a cold collisional plasma are studied analytically. It is found that, due to the singular dielectric features of…
The appearance of unconventional vacuum properties in intense fields has long been an active field of research. In this paper the vacuum polarization effect is investigated via a pump probe scheme of a probe light propagating in the vacuum…
We derive a simple expression for the photon helicity and polarisation-flip probabilities in arbitrary background fields, in the low energy regime. Taking the background to model a focused laser beam, we study the impact of pulse shape and…
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…
We want to study the influence of the quantum vacuum on the light propagation. At first, by working in the standard linear quantum theory of the electromagnetic fields, it is shown that the electric permittivity and the magnetic…