Experiment for measuring the post-Maxwellian parameters of nonlinear electrodynamics of vacuum with laser-interferometer techniques

Abstract

An experimetnt is proposed to measure the post-Maxwellian parameters of the nonlinear electrodynamics of a vacuum. It is shown that the system for recording small differences of optical paths used in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and in other laser interferometers for gravitational wave detectors permits us to measure the nonlinear electrodynamics corrections predicted by quantum electrodynamics. However, the use of LIGO or other full-scale laser interferometers of the gravitational wave detectors for this purpose does not seem sensible. Therefore it is suggested to perform this experiment on one of the laboratory prototypes used to develop interferometry for gravitational wave detection. The sensitivity of these laboratory prototypes is about the same as the sensitivity of the full-scale instruments, and the other parameters are most similar to the optimal values allowing us to observe the considered effect: the arm length ${l}_{0}$ of these prototypes is about several meters and in the Fabry-Perot interferometer about $N\ensuremath{\sim}2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{5}$ bounces can be realized. A further increase in the detector sensitivity is noted to offer also an opportunity of experimentally studying the nonlinearly electrodynamic corrections predicted by the Born-Infeld theory.