On the possibility of Vacuum-QED measurements with gravitational wave detectors

Abstract

Quantum electro dynamics (QED) comprises virtual particle production and thus gives rise to a refractive index of the vacuum larger than unity in the presence of a magnetic field. This predicted effect has not been measured to date, even after considerable effort of a number of experiments. It has been proposed by other authors to possibly use gravitational wave detectors for such vacuum QED measurements, and we give this proposal some new consideration in this paper. In particular we look at possible source field magnet designs and further constraints on the implementation at a gravitational wave detector. We conclude that such an experiment seems to be feasible with permanent magnets, yet still challenging in its implementation.

11 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Q & A Experiment to Search for Vacuum Dichroism, Pseudoscalar-Photon Interaction and Millicharged Fermions
• The BMV experiment : a novel apparatus to study the propagation of light in a transverse magnetic field
• First results from the new PVLAS apparatus: a new limit on vacuum magnetic birefringence
• Interferometry of light propagation in pulsed fields
• Probing For New Physics and Detecting non linear vacuum QED effects using gravitational wave interferometer antennas

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Direct limits for scalar field dark matter from a gravitational-wave detector
• Quantum reflection of photons off spatio-temporal electromagnetic field inhomogeneities
• On the Heisenberg limit for detecting vacuum birefringence
• On the observability of field-assisted birefringent Delbrück scattering
• Standing wave solutions in Born-Infeld theory
• The PVLAS experiment: a 25 year effort to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence