2017/12/24 by Felix Karbstein, Elena A. Mosman
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Molecular Physics #Circular polarization #Electromagnetic field #Electron #Gaussian #Hermite polynomials #Laguerre polynomials #Laser-Plasma Interactions and Diagnostics #Magnetic field #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Photon #Photon polarization #Physics #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Tensor (intrinsic definition) #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1142/s021773231850044x
published as Modern Physics Letters A Vol. 33, No. 7 (2018) 1850044 · 6 pages; Contribution to the LPHYS'17 Conference Proceedings
arxiv created 2017/12/24 · openalex publication_date 2018/03/07 · arxiv updated 2018/03/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We derive analytical expressions for the photon polarization tensor in circularly polarized Hermite-Gaussian (HG) and Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams, complementing the corresponding results for linearly polarized beams obtained recently. As they are based upon a locally constant field approximation of the one-loop Heisenberg–Euler effective Lagrangian for quantum electrodynamics (QED) in constant fields, our results are generically limited to slowly varying electromagnetic fields, varying on spatial (temporal) scales much larger than the Compton wavelength (time) of the electron.