Enhancing quantum vacuum signatures with tailored laser beams

Abstract

We demonstrate that tailored laser beams provide a powerful means to make quantum vacuum signatures in strong electromagnetic fields accessible in experiment. Typical scenarios aiming at the detection of quantum vacuum nonlinearities at the high-intensity frontier envision the collision of focused laser pulses. The effective interaction of the driving fields mediated by vacuum fluctuations gives rise to signal photons encoding the signature of quantum vacuum nonlinearity. Isolating a small number of signal photons from the large background of the driving laser photons poses a major experimental challenge. The main idea of the present work is to modify the far-field properties of a driving laser beam to exhibit a field-free hole in its center, thereby allowing for an essentially background free measurement of the signal scattered in the forward direction. Our explicit construction makes use of a peculiar far-field/focus duality.

5 pages, 3 figures; presentation improved, matches PRD version

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Cited by in corpus (18)

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• General quantum-mechanical solution for twisted electrons in a uniform magnetic field
• Quantum vacuum signatures in multi-color laser pulse collisions
• QED vacuum nonlinearity in Laguerre-Gauss beams
• Experimental estimates of the photon background in a potential light-by-light scattering study
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• Numerical Simulations of the Nonlinear Quantum Vacuum in the Heisenberg-Euler Weak-Field Expansion
• Susceptibility of a single photon wave packet
• Back-reflection in dipole fields and beyond
• Simulating vacuum birefringence with a diffractive beam propagation code
• Phase transition analogs in laser collisions with a dark-field setup
• The Darkfield Approach to Measuring Vacuum Birefringence and Light-by-Light Couplings -- A Proof-of-Principle Experiment
• High-energy photon hologram of a photon gas
• X-ray vacuum diffraction at finite spatio-temporal offset