Related papers: Probing the vacuum as a chiral medium
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…
Oscillations of photons into axion-like particles in a high-intensity laser field are investigated. Nonlinear QED effects are considered through the low energy behavior of the vacuum polarization tensor, which is derived from the…
We consider the Heisenberg-Euler action for an electromagnetic field in vacuum, which includes quantum corrections to the Maxwell equations induced by photon-photon scattering. We show that, in some configurations, the plane monochromatic…
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…
Electromagnetic waves propagating through vacuum can polarize virtual electron-positron pairs; this polarization, in turn, nonlinearly modifies their propagation. A semi-classical nonlinear wave equation describing the propagation is…
We consider birefringent (i.e., polarization changing) scattering of x-ray photons at the superposition of two optical laser beams of ultra-high intensity and study the resonant contributions of axions or axion-like particles, which could…
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…
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 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…
Vacuum polarization, a key prediction of quantum theory, can cause a variety of intriguing phenomena that can be triggered by high-intensity laser pulses. The Heisenberg-Euler theory of the quantum vacuum supplements Maxwell's theory of…
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…
We study the no reflection condition for a planar boundary between vacuum and an isotropic chiral medium. In general chiral media, elliptically polarized waves incident at a particular angle satisfy the no reflection condition. When the…
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…
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…
From an effective field theory of electromagnetism in vacuum including all lowest-order nonlinear terms consistent with Lorentz invariance and locality of photon/photon interactions, we derive an effective medium description of strong…
Considering the effective Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian, i.e., non-linear photon-photon interactions, we study the circular polarization of electromagnetic radiation based on the time-evolution of Stokes parameters. To the leading order, we…
This paper studies the impact of vacuum polarization on light propagation in the background of a distorted, deformed compact object. Focusing on a spacetime containing two quadrupole parameters associated with the central object and…
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…
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 quantum nature of light-matter interactions in a circularly polarized vacuum field was probed by spontaneous emission from quantum dots in three-dimensional chiral photonic crystals. Due to the circularly polarized eigenmodes along the…