Related papers: Probing the vacuum as a chiral medium
Absorption and dispersion of probe photons in the field of a high-intensity circularly polarized laser wave are investigated. The optical theorem is applied for determining the absorption coefficients in terms of the imaginary part of the…
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…
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…
Cosmic Microwave Background experiments must achieve very accurate calibration of their polarization reference frame to avoid biasing the cosmological parameters. In particular, a wrong or inaccurate calibration might mimic the presence of…
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…
Interaction of a charged particle in a static magnetic background, i.e., a Landau system with circularly polarised gravitational wave (GW) is studied quantum mechanically in the long wavelength and low velocity limit. We quantize the…
This work is concerned with the propagation of electromagnetic waves in isotropic chiral media and with the effects produced by a plane boundary between two such media. In analogy with the phenomena of reflection and refraction of plane…
We study the angular deflection of the circular polarized components of a linearly polarized probe field in a weakly birefringent atomic system in tripod configuration. A spatially inhomogeneous control field incident obliquely onto an…
The QED vacuum polarization in external monochromatic plane-wave electromagnetic fields is calculated with spatial and temporal variations of the external fields being taken into account. We develop a perturbation theory to calculate the…
It has been long recognized that the spatial polarization of the electronic clouds in molecules, and the spatial arrangements of atoms into chiral molecular structures, play crucial roles in physics, chemistry and biology. However, these…
Cosmic birefringence is the process that rotates the plane of polarization by an amount, $\alpha$, as photons propagate through free space. Such an effect arises in parity-violating extensions to the electromagnetic sector, such as the…
Photons experience mirror asymmetry of macroscopic chiral media, as in circular dichroism and polarization rotation, since left and right handed circular polarizations differently couple with matter handedness. Conversely, free relativistic…
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…
The polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be used to search for parity-violating processes like that predicted by a Chern-Simons coupling to a light pseudoscalar field. Such an interaction rotates $E$ modes into $B$…
We systematically investigate the generation of optical chirality patterns by applying the superposition of two waves in three scenarios, namely plane waves in free space, evanescent waves of totally reflected light at dielectric interface…
Small amplitude inhomogeneous plane waves propagating in any direction in a homogeneously deformed Hadamard material are considered. Conditions for circular polarization are established. The analysis relies on the use of complex vectors (or…
Real photon-photon scattering is a long-predicted phenomenon that is being searched for in experiment in the form of a birefringent vacuum at optical and X-ray frequencies. We present results of calculations and numerical simulations for a…
Recent ultra-intense lasers of subcritical fields and proposed observations of the x-rays polarization from highly magnetized neutron stars of supercritical fields have attracted attention to vacuum birefringence, a unique feature of…
We present the current status and outlook of the optical characterization of the polarimeter at the Bir\'{e}fringence Magn\'etique du Vide (BMV) experiment. BMV is a polarimetric search for the QED predicted anisotropy of vacuum in the…
We apply worldline methods to the study of vacuum polarisation effects in plane wave backgrounds, in both scalar and spinor QED. We calculate helicity-flip probabilities to one loop order and treated exactly in the background field, and…