2013/12/31 by Victor Dinu, Tom Heinzl, Anton Ilderton +2 · 138 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Amplitude #Birefringence #Helicity #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Laser-Plasma Interactions and Diagnostics #Photon #Photon polarization #Physics #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #QED vacuum #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Refractive index #Scattering #Spin-flip #Vacuum energy #Vacuum polarization #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.89.125003
published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 89(12) (American Physical Society) · Version 2: additional results added, including discussion of vacuum refractive indices, analysis of flip and non-flip ampltidues at high-energy, additional plots, new title. Now 17 pages, 10 figures
arxiv created 2014/01/28 · openalex publication_date 2014/06/04 · arxiv updated 2014/06/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
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.