Related papers: Vacuum Birefringence in a Rotating Magnetic Field
Multiphoton processes in undulators with plane polarized magnetic field are considered. It is shown that the use of strong magnetic fields in the undulator, for beams with relatively low energy makes it possible to increase substantially…
The quantum electrodynamics (QED) theory predicts that the quantum vacuum becomes birefringent in the presence of ultra-strong magnetic fields -- a fundamental effect yet to be directly observed. Magnetars, isolated neutron stars with…
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…
Wave propagation properties in a medium are fundamentally affected when this medium is moving instead of at rest. In isotropic dielectric media rotation has two noteworthy contributions: one is a mechanically induced circular birefringence…
Hints of cosmic microwave background polarization rotation ($\Delta\vartheta \sim 10^{-3}$ rad) are commonly attributed to late-time dynamics of ultralight axions. We show that such ultralight degrees of freedom are not required.…
Nonlinear magneto-optical rotation is studied under non-equilibrium conditions. The polarization rotation of linearly polarized light traversing a rubidium vapor cell is observed versus the time-dependent (swept) longitudinal magnetic field…
The polarization plane of the cosmic microwave background radiation can be rotated either in a magnetized plasma or in the presence of a quintessential background with pseudoscalar coupling to electromagnetism. A unified treatment of these…
Birefringence in ionized, magnetized media is usually measured as Faraday rotation of linearly polarized radiation. However, pulses propagating through regions with very large Faraday rotation measures (RMs) can split into circularly…
Laser-based searches of the yet unobserved vacuum birefringence might be sensitive for very light hypothetical particles carrying a tiny fraction of the electron charge. We show that, with the help of contemporary techniques, polarimetric…
Forthcoming radio surveys will include full polarisation information, which can be potentially useful for weak lensing observations. We propose a new method to measure the (integrated) gravitational field between a source and the observer,…
Plasma lensing displays interesting characteristics that set it apart from gravitational lensing. The magnetised medium induces birefringence in the two polarisation modes. As the lensing deflection grows stronger, e.g. when images form…
Nonlinear effects in vacuum have been predicted but never observed yet directly. The PVLAS collaboration has long been working on an apparatus aimed at detecting such effects by measuring vacuum magnetic birefringence. Unfortunately the…
The polarization properties of monochromatic light beams are studied. In contrast to the idealization of an electromagnetic plane wave, finite beams which are everywhere linearly polarized in the same direction do not exist. Neither do…
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…
The dispersion characteristics of an circularly polarized electromagnetic wave of arbitrary amplitude, propagating in a highly (thermally and kinematically) relativistic plasma, are shown to approach those of a linear wave in an…
Manifestations of orbital angular momentum induced effects in the diffraction of a radially polarized vector beam by an off-axis tilted aperture are studied both experimentally and theoretically. Experiments were carried out to extract the…
We study photon propagation in a strong magnetic field $B\sim B_{\rm{cr}}$, where $B_{\rm cr}= \frac{m^2}{e} \simeq 4.4 \times 10^{13}$ Gauss is the Schwinger critical field. We show that the expected value of the Hamiltonian of a quantized…
In the presence of strong magnetic fields, the vacuum becomes a birefringent medium. We show that this QED effect decouples the polarization modes of photons leaving the NS surface. Both the total intensity and the intensity in each of the…
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…
We predict theoretically and demonstrate experimentally an ellipticity-dependent nonlinear magneto-optic rotation of elliptically-polarized light propagating in a coherent atomic medium. We show that this effect results from a hexadecapole…