Interferometric measurement of the deflection of light by light in air
arXiv:2401.13506 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.109.053510
Abstract
The aim of the DeLLight (Deflection of Light by Light) experiment is to observe for the first time the optical nonlinearity in vacuum, as predicted by Quantum Electrodynamics, by measuring the refraction of a low-intensity focused laser pulse (probe) when crossing the effective vacuum index gradient induced by a high-intensity focused laser pulse (pump). The deflection signal is amplified by using a Sagnac interferometer. Here, we report the first measurement performed with the DeLLight pilot interferometer, of the deflection of light by light in air, with a low-intensity pump. We show that the deflection signal measured by the interferometer is amplified, and is in agreement with the expected signal induced by the optical Kerr effect in air. Moreover, we verify that the signal varies as expected as a function of the pump intensity, the temporal delay between the pump and the probe, and their relative polarisation. These results represent a proof of concept of the DeLLight experimental method based on interferometric amplification.
arXiv comment14 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. A
References in corpus (19)
- Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems
- Ultrasensitive Beam Deflection Measurement via Interferometric Weak Value Amplification
- Advances in QED with intense background fields
- Evidence for light-by-light scattering in heavy-ion collisions with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
- On the Observation of Vacuum Birefringence
- Evidence for light-by-light scattering and searches for axion-like particles in ultraperipheral PbPb collisions at 5.02 TeV
- Conceptual Design Report for the LUXE Experiment
- Measuring Vacuum Polarisation with High Power Lasers
- Q & A Experiment to Search for Vacuum Dichroism, Pseudoscalar-Photon Interaction and Millicharged Fermions
- Double-slit vacuum polarisation effects in ultra-intense laser fields
- Light by light diffraction in vacuum
- Analysis of four-wave mixing of high-power lasers for the detection of elastic photon-photon scattering
- The OVAL experiment: A new experiment to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence using high repetition pulsed magnets
- Single Particle Detection System for Strong-Field QED Experiments
- Refraction of light by light in vacuum
- The DeLLight experiment to observe an optically-induced change of the vacuum index
- Optical Kerr effect in vacuum
- Probing vacuum birefringence by phase-contrast Fourier imaging under fields of high-intensity lasers
- Performance of a Sagnac interferometer to observe vacuum optical nonlinearity