Photon-Photon Scattering at the High-Intensity Frontier: Paraxial Beams
arXiv:1812.02458 · doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1206/1/012016
Abstract
Our goal is to study optical signatures of quantum vacuum nonlinearities in strong macroscopic electromagnetic fields provided by high-intensity laser beams. The vacuum emission scheme is perfectly suited for this task as it naturally distinguishes between incident laser beams, described as classical electromagnetic fields driving the effect, and emitted signal photons encoding the signature of quantum vacuum nonlinearity. Using the Heisenberg-Euler effective action, our approach allows for a reliable study of photonic signatures of QED vacuum nonlinearity in the parameter regimes accessible by all-optical high-intensity laser experiments. To this end, we employ an efficient, flexible numerical algorithm, which allows for a detailed study of the signal photons emerging in the collision of focused paraxial high-intensity laser pulses. Due to the high accuracy of our numerical solutions we predict the total number of signal photons, but also have full access to the signal photons' characteristics, including their spectrum, propagation directions and polarizations. We discuss setups offering an excellent background-to-noise ratio, thus providing an important step towards the experimental verification of quantum vacuum nonlinearities.
arXiv comment7 pages, 2 figures; talk given at LPHYS'18, Nottingham, United Kingdom
References in corpus (17)
- Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems
- Using high-power lasers for detection of elastic photon-photon scattering
- Measuring Vacuum Polarisation with High Power Lasers
- Quantum Vacuum Experiments Using High Intensity Lasers
- Search for Stimulated Photon-Photon Scattering in Vacuum
- Exploring high-intensity QED at ELI
- Photon-photon scattering in collisions of laser pulses
- Stimulated photon emission from the vacuum
- Light by light diffraction in vacuum
- Analysis of four-wave mixing of high-power lasers for the detection of elastic photon-photon scattering
- Four-wave interaction in gas and vacuum. Definition of a third order nonlinear effective susceptibility in vacuum
- All-optical signatures of Strong-Field QED in the vacuum emission picture
- Three-pulse photon-photon scattering
- Photon-photon scattering at the high-intensity frontier
- The photon polarization tensor in pulsed Hermite- and Laguerre-Gaussian beams
- Photon merging and splitting in electromagnetic field inhomogeneities
- Self-induced mode mixing of ultraintense lasers in vacuum