2008/02/01 by Daniele Tommasini, A. Ferrando, Albert Ferrando +3 · 63 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies #Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Laser #Laser-Plasma Interactions and Diagnostics #Nonlinear optics #Nonlinear system #Optics #Phase (matter) #Photon #Physics #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Scattering #physics.gen-ph #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.77.042101
published in Physical Review A 77(4) (American Physical Society) · 8 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2008/02/01 · openalex publication_date 2008/04/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In a recent paper, we have shown that the QED nonlinear corrections imply a phase correction to the linear evolution of crossing electromagnetic waves in vacuum. Here, we provide a more complete analysis, including a full numerical solution of the QED nonlinear wave equations for short-distance propagation in a symmetric configuration. The excellent agreement of such a solution with the result that we obtain using our perturbatively motivated variational approach is then used to justify an analytical approximation that can be applied in a more general case. This allows us to find the most promising configuration for the search of photon-photon scattering in optics experiments. In particular, we show that our previous requirement of phase coherence between the two crossing beams can be released. We then propose a very simple experiment that can be performed at future exawatt laser facilities, such as ELI, by bombarding a low power laser beam with the exawatt bump.