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.

References in corpus (33)

• Glauber Modeling in High Energy Nuclear Collisions
• Description and performance of track and primary-vertex reconstruction with the CMS tracker
• The Physics of Ultraperipheral Collisions at the LHC
• Nuclear symmetry energy probed by neutron skin thickness of nuclei
• Collider Probes of Axion-Like Particles
• New PVLAS results and limits on magnetically induced optical rotation and ellipticity in vacuum
• Evidence for vacuum birefringence from the first optical polarimetry measurement of the isolated neutron star RX\, J1856.5$-$3754
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• Probing the linear polarization of photons in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions
• Searching in the dark: the hunt for the dark photon
• Limits on Low Energy Photon-Photon Scattering from an Experiment on Magnetic Vacuum Birefringence
• Polarized x-rays from a magnetar
• Direct Bound-Electron $g$ factor Difference Measurement with Coupled Ions
• Tomography of Ultra-relativistic Nuclei with Polarized Photon-gluon Collisions
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• Vacuum birefringence in strong magnetic fields: (II) Complex refractive index from the lowest Landau level
• The OVAL experiment: A new experiment to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence using high repetition pulsed magnets
• Observation of Two-source Interference in the Photoproduction Reaction $AuAu\to AuAu{\rho }^0$
• Vacuum Birefringence in a Rotating Magnetic Field
• Extracting the rho meson wavefunction from HERA data
• Direct accessibility of the fundamental constants governing light-by-light scattering
• Exclusive and inclusive muon pair production in collisions of relativistic nuclei
• Centrality dependence of dilepton production via $\gamma \gamma$ processes from Wigner distributions of photons in nuclei
• Evidence for higher order QED in e+ e- pair production at RHIC
• Using nonlinear Breit-Wheeler to test nonlinear vacuum birefringence
• Higher Order QED Calculation of Ultrarelativistic Heavy Ion Production of mu+ mu- Pairs
• Towards a direct measurement of the quantum vacuum Lagrangian coupling coefficients using two counter propagating super-intense laser pulses
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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