Report on Progress in Physics: Observation of the Breit-Wheeler Process and Vacuum Birefringence in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

This Report reviews the effort over several decades to observe the linear Breit-Wheeler process ($\gamma \gamma \to e^{+}{e}^{-}$) and vacuum birefringence in high-energy particle and heavy-ion collider experiment. This Report, motivated by STAR's recent observations, attempts to summarize the key issues related to the interpretation of polarized $\gamma \gamma \to l^{+}{l}^{-}$ measurements in high-energy experiments. To that end, we start by reviewing the historical context and essential theoretical developments, before focusing on the decades of progress made in high-energy collider experiments. Special attention is given to the evolution in experimental approaches in response to various challenges and the demanding detector capabilities required to unambiguously identify the linear Breit-Wheeler process and to detect the signatures of vacuum birefringence. We close the report with a discussion, followed by a look at near-future opportunities for utilizing these discoveries and for testing QED in previously unexplored regimes.

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Letter of Intent: Towards a Vacuum Birefringence Experiment at the Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields
• Signatures of vacuum birefringence in low-power flying focus pulses
• Generation of Ultrarelativistic Vortex Leptons with Large Orbital Angular Momenta
• Fundamental constants from photon-photon scattering in three-beam collisions
• Dimuon and ditau production in photon-photon collisions at next-to-leading order in QED
• Estimation of electric field in intermediate-energy heavy-ion collisions
• A dark-field setup for the measurement of light-by-light scattering with high-intensity lasers
• Probing Quantum Phenomena through Photoproduction in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Photoproduction of lepton pair in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Linearly Polarized Photon Fusion as a Precision Probe of the Tau Lepton Dipole Moments at Lepton Colliders