Probing the semi-macroscopic vacuum by higher-harmonic generation under focused intense laser fields

Abstract

The invention of the laser immediately enabled the detection of nonlinear photon-matter interactions, as manifested for example by Franken et al.'s detection of second-harmonic generation. With the recent advancement in high-power, high-energy lasers and the examples of nonlinearity studies of the laser-matter interaction by virtue of properly arranging lasers and detectors, we envision the possibility of probing nonlinearities of the photon interaction in vacuum over substantial space-time scales, compared to the microscopic scale provided by high-energy accelerators. Specifically, we introduce the photon-photon interaction in a quasi-parallel colliding system and the detection of higher harmonics in that system. The method proposed should realize a far greater sensitivity of probing possible low-mass and weakly coupling fields that have been postulated. With the availability of a large number of coherent photons, we suggest a scheme for the detection of higher harmonics via the averaged resonant production and decay of these postulated fields within the uncertainty of the center-of-mass energy between incoming laser photons. The method carves out a substantial swath of new experimental parameter regimes on the coupling of these fields to photons, under appropriate laser technologies, even weaker than that of gravity in the mass range well below 1 eV.