Abstract
Our goal is to study optical signatures of quantum vacuum nonlinearities in strong macroscopic electromagnetic fields provided by high-intensity laser beams. The vacuum emission scheme is perfectly suited for this task as it naturally distinguishes between incident laser beams, described as classical electromagnetic fields driving the effect, and emitted signal photons encoding the signature of quantum vacuum nonlinearity. Using the Heisenberg-Euler effective action, our approach allows for a reliable study of photonic signatures of QED vacuum nonlinearity in the parameter regimes accessible by all-optical high-intensity laser experiments. To this end, we employ an efficient, flexible numerical algorithm, which allows for a detailed study of the signal photons emerging in the collision of focused paraxial high-intensity laser pulses. Due to the high accuracy of our numerical solutions we predict the total number of signal photons, but also have full access to the signal photons’ characteristics, including their spectrum, propagation directions and polarizations. We discuss setups offering an excellent background-to-noise ratio, thus providing an important step towards the experimental verification of quantum vacuum nonlinearities.
Highlights
The effective interactions of electromagnetic fields in the vacuum are one of the most surprising predictions of strong-field quantum electrodynamics (QED) [1,2,3,4]
Our goal is to study optical signatures of quantum vacuum nonlinearities in strong macroscopic electromagnetic fields provided by high-intensity laser beams
The vacuum emission scheme is perfectly suited for this task as it naturally distinguishes between incident laser beams, described as classical electromagnetic fields driving the effect, and emitted signal photons encoding the signature of quantum vacuum nonlinearity
Summary
The effective interactions of electromagnetic fields in the vacuum are one of the most surprising predictions of strong-field quantum electrodynamics (QED) [1,2,3,4]. The reason is that they are parametrically suppressed with the electron mass me ≈ 511keV for electromagnetic fields of optical up to X-ray frequencies ω mec2/ , translating into a so-called critical electric Ecr = m2ec3/(e ) ≈ 1.3 × 1016V/cm and critical magnetic Bcr = Ecr/c ≈ 4 × 109T reference field strength. These critical fields are much larger than the strengths of all macroscopic electric E and magnetic B fields presently available in the laboratory. In comparison to classical Maxwell theory, the leading QED vacuum nonlinearity is suppressed by factors of (E/Ecr)2−n(B/Bcr)n, with n ∈ {0, 1, 2}
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