Collective polarization exchanges in collisions of photon clouds

Abstract

The one-loop "vacuum" Heisenberg-Euler coupling of four electromagnetic fields can lead to interesting collective effects in the collision of two photon clouds, on a time scale orders of magnitude faster than one estimates from the cross-section and density. We estimate the characteristic time for macroscopic transformation of positive to negative helicity in clouds that are initially totally polarized and for depolarization of a polarized beam traversing an unpolarized cloud.

Recapitulates much that is in hep-ph/0402127, with new results in the last section, and the first section drastically reduced in view of the previous work of Kotkin and Serbo. Typo corrected in eq. 14

References in corpus (3)

• Neutrino flavor conversion in a neutrino background: single- versus multi-particle description
• Do many-particle neutrino interactions cause a novel coherent effect?
• Speed-up through entanglement -- many-body effects in neutrino processes

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Speed-up of neutrino transformations in a supernova environment
• The multi-angle instability in dense neutrino systems
• Quantum break in high intensity gravitational wave interactions
• Susceptibility of a single photon wave packet
• Instabilities in neutrino systems induced by interactions with scalars
• Polarization exchange in colliding photon beams in a medium of an atomic gas
• High-energy photon hologram of a photon gas