Vacuum birefringence at the Gamma Factory

Abstract

We explore the perspectives of studying vacuum birefringence at the Gamma Factory. To this end, we assess in detail the parameter regime which can be reliably analyzed resorting to the leading contribution to the Heisenberg-Euler effective Lagrangian. We explicitly show that -- contrarily to naive expectations -- this approach allows for the accurate theoretical study of quantum vacuum signatures up to fairly large photon energies. The big advantage of this parameter regime is the possibility of studying the phenomenon in experimentally realistic, manifestly inhomogeneous pump and probe field configurations. Thereafter, we focus on two specific scenarios giving rise to a vacuum birefringence effect for traversing gamma probe photons. In the first scenario the birefringence phenomenon is induced by a quasi-constant static magnetic field. In the second case it is driven by a counter-propagating high-intensity laser field.

20 pages, 3 figures; contribution to a special issue devoted to the "Physics Opportunities with the Gamma Factory"

References in corpus (8)

• Photon polarisation in light-by-light scattering: finite size effects
• Probing vacuum polarization effects with high-intensity lasers
• The OVAL experiment: A new experiment to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence using high repetition pulsed magnets
• Laser photon merging in an electromagnetic field inhomogeneity
• The photon polarization tensor in pulsed Hermite- and Laguerre-Gaussian beams
• Large orders in strong-field QED
• The DeLLight experiment to observe an optically-induced change of the vacuum index
• Properties of Finite Amplitude Electromagnetic Waves propagating in the Quantum Vacuum

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Low-energy multi-photon scattering at tree-level and one-loop order in a homogeneous electromagnetic field