Vacuum refractive indices and helicity flip in strong-field QED

Victor Dinu, Tom Heinzl, Anton Ilderton, Mattias Marklund, and Greger Torgrimsson
Phys. Rev. D 89, 125003 – Published 4 June 2014

Abstract

Vacuum birefringence is governed by the amplitude for a photon to flip helicity or polarization state in an external field. Here, we calculate the flip and nonflip amplitudes in arbitrary plane wave backgrounds, along with the induced spacetime-dependent refractive indices of the vacuum. We compare the behavior of the amplitudes in the low energy and high energy regimes, and analyze the impact of pulse shape and energy. We also provide the first lightfront-QED derivation of the coefficients in the Heisenberg-Euler effective action.

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  • Received 28 January 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.125003

© 2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Victor Dinu1,*, Tom Heinzl2,†, Anton Ilderton3,‡, Mattias Marklund3,§, and Greger Torgrimsson3,¶

  • 1Department of Physics, University of Bucharest, P.O. Box MG-11, Măgurele 077125, Romania
  • 2School of Computing and Mathematics, Plymouth University, Plymouth PL4 8AA, United Kingdom
  • 3Department of Applied Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-41296 Gothenburg, Sweden

  • *dinu@barutu.fizica.unibuc.ro
  • theinzl@plymouth.ac.uk
  • anton.ilderton@chalmers.se
  • §mattias.marklund@chalmers.se
  • greger.torgrimsson@chalmers.se

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Vol. 89, Iss. 12 — 15 June 2014

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