Letter of Intent: Towards a Vacuum Birefringence Experiment at the Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields

Abstract

Quantum field theory predicts a nonlinear response of the vacuum to strong electromagnetic fields of macroscopic extent. This fundamental tenet has remained experimentally challenging and is yet to be tested in the laboratory. A particularly distinct signature of the resulting optical activity of the quantum vacuum is vacuum birefringence. This offers an excellent opportunity for a precision test of nonlinear quantum electrodynamics in an uncharted parameter regime. Recently, the operation of the high-intensity laser ReLaX provided by the Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields (HIBEF) has been inaugurated at the High Energy Density (HED) scientific instrument of the European XFEL. We make the case that this worldwide unique combination of an x-ray free-electron laser and an ultra-intense near-infrared laser together with recent advances in high-precision x-ray polarimetry, refinements of prospective discovery scenarios, and progress in their accurate theoretical modelling have set the stage for performing an actual discovery experiment of quantum vacuum nonlinearity.

34 pages, 21 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• 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
• Primer of Strong-Field Quantum Electrodynamics for Experimentalists
• Worldline Modeling of Ultra-Intense Lasers for N-photon Scattering Processes
• Simulating vacuum birefringence with a diffractive beam propagation code
• Back-reflection in dipole fields and beyond
• Interferometric Differential High-Frequency Lock-In Probe for Laser-Induced Vacuum Birefringence
• The Darkfield Approach to Measuring Vacuum Birefringence and Light-by-Light Couplings -- A Proof-of-Principle Experiment
• Comparison of wave-mixing processes in rarefied gas and QED vacuum using numerical simulations
• High-energy photon hologram of a photon gas