Strong-field vacuum polarisation with high energy lasers

Abstract

When photons propagate in vacuum they may fluctuate into matter pairs thus allowing the vacuum to be polarised. This linear effect leads to charge screening and renormalisation. When exposed to an intense background field a nonlinear effect can arise when the vacuum is polarised by higher powers of the background. This nonlinearity breaks the superposition principle of classical electrodynamics, allowing for light-by-light scattering of probe and background photons mediated through virtual pairs dressed by the background. Vacuum polarisation is a strong-field effect when all orders of interaction between the virtual pair and the background must be taken into account. In this investigation we show that multiple scattering processes of this type may be observed by utilising high-energy laser pulses with long pulse duration, such as are available at facilities like ELI Beamlines. In combination with appropriate sources of high-energy probe photons, multiple probe-background light-by-light scattering allows for testing the genuine nonlinear regime of strong-field QED. This provides access to the uncharted nonperturbative regime beyond the weak-field limit.

42 pages, 8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Signatures of vacuum birefringence in low-power flying focus pulses
• Fundamental constants from photon-photon scattering in three-beam collisions
• On Measuring Stimulated Photon-photon Scattering using Multiple Ultraintense Lasers
• Coherent enhancement of QED cross-sections in electromagnetic backgrounds
• Relativistic Quantum Kinetic Theory: Higher order contributions in assisted Schwinger pair production
• Low-energy multi-photon scattering at tree-level and one-loop order in a homogeneous electromagnetic field