Observability of an induced electric dipole moment of the neutron from nonlinear QED

Abstract

It has been shown recently that a neutron placed in an external quasistatic electric field develops an induced electric dipole moment ${\mathbf{p}}_{\mathrm{IND}}$ due to quantum fluctuations in the QED vacuum. A feasible experiment which could detect such an effect is proposed and described here. It is shown that the peculiar angular dependence of ${\mathbf{p}}_{\mathrm{IND}}$ on the orientation of the neutron spin leads to a characteristic asymmetry in polarized neutron scattering by heavy nuclei. This asymmetry can be of the order of $10^{-3}$ for neutrons with epithermal energies. For thermalized neutrons from a hot moderator one still expects experimentally accessible values of the order of $10^{-4}$. The contribution of the induced effect to the neutron scattering length is expected to be only one order of magnitude smaller than that due to the neutron polarizability from its quark substructure. The experimental observation of this scattering asymmetry would be the first ever signal of nonlinearity in electrodynamics due to quantum fluctuations in the QED vacuum.

References in corpus (4)

• Barrier control in tunneling e^+ e^- photoproduction
• Consequences of Dirac Theory of the Positron
• Vacuum Birefringence in a Rotating Magnetic Field
• QED vacuum fluctuations and induced electric dipole moment of the neutron

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems
• Some aspects of an induced electric dipole moment in rotating and nonrotating frames
• The fourth dimension of the nucleon structure: spacetime analysis of the timelike electromagnetic proton form factors
• Non-perturbative Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian and Paraelectricity in Magnetized Massless QED
• Enhancement of annihilation cross sections by electric interactions between the antineutron and the field of a large nucleus