Using nonlinear Breit-Wheeler to test nonlinear vacuum birefringence

Abstract

Quantum electrodynamics predicts that the quantum vacuum is birefringent, but due to the very small cross-section this is yet to be confirmed by experiment. Vacuum birefringence arises as the elastic part of photon-photon scattering; the inelastic part is Breit-Wheeler pair-production. We outline how measurements of the photon-polarised nonlinear Breit-Wheeler process can be used to infer a measurement of nonlinear vacuum birefringence. As an example scenario, we calculate the accuracy of such a measurement for parameters anticipated at upcoming laser-particle experiments.

8 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Evidence for vacuum birefringence from the first optical polarimetry measurement of the isolated neutron star RX\, J1856.5$-$3754
• Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production in a tightly focused laser beam
• Superluminality and UV Completion
• Direct accessibility of the fundamental constants governing light-by-light scattering
• Large orders in strong-field QED

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Report on Progress in Physics: Observation of the Breit-Wheeler Process and Vacuum Birefringence in Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Strong-field vacuum polarisation with high energy lasers
• Nonlinear Breit-Wheeler pair production using polarized photons from inverse Compton scattering
• Kramers-Krönig approach to the electric permittivity of the vacuum in a strong constant electric field
• Primer of Strong-Field Quantum Electrodynamics for Experimentalists
• Strong-field QED in Furry-picture momentum-space formulation: Ward identities and Feynman diagrams
• Spinning Pairs: Supporting ${}^3{P}_0$ Quark-Pair Creation from Landau Gauge Green's Functions