Optical Kerr effect in vacuum

Abstract

From an effective field theory of electromagnetism in vacuum including all lowest-order nonlinear terms consistent with Lorentz invariance and locality of photon/photon interactions, we derive an effective medium description of strong background fields as regards their influence on a weak probe. We mainly consider as background a pump beam with well-defined wave vector and polarization. This leads us to define a nonlinear index of vacuum which, in the Euler-Heisenberg model derived from QED, has an optimal value of $1.555\times 10^{-33}{\mathrm{cm}}^2/\mathrm{W}$ for a linearly polarized pump as seen by a counter-propagating, orthogonally polarized probe. We further generalize the model to include coupling to an axion field. In the limit where the axion mass is much smaller than the typical photon energy, this yields dispersive corrections, and the axionic signature is found to be greatly enhanced for a circularly polarized pump as compared to a linearly polarized one. The formalism here presented points to a simplification of the DeLLight experiment [X. Sarazin et al., Eur. Phys. J. D 70, 13 (2016)] aiming to measure the deflection of a probe by a tightly focused laser pulse.

arXiv comment20 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. A

References in corpus (15)

• Axion Cosmology
• WISPy Cold Dark Matter
• Astrophysical Axion Bounds
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• The DeLLight experiment to observe an optically-induced change of the vacuum index
• The axion-photon mixing in non-linear electrodynamic scenarios
• The PVLAS experiment: a 25 year effort to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence
• Performance of a Sagnac interferometer to observe vacuum optical nonlinearity
• Interferometric measurement of the deflection of light by light in air
• Analogy of space-time as an elastic medium -- Study of the perturbation tensor of the metric $h_{\mu \nu }$ through the prism of the analogy of the theory of elasticity -- Analysis and potential consequences
• 3+1 formulation of light modes in nonlinear electrodynamics