2012/11/05 by R Battesti, Rémy Battesti, C Rizzo +1 · 154 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Electric field #Electron #Magnetic field #Nonlinear Photonic Systems #Nonlinear system #Particle (ecology) #Photon #QED vacuum #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum and Classical Electrodynamics #Quantum optics #Vacuum energy #physics.optics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0034-4885/76/1/016401
published in Reports on Progress in Physics 76(1), 016401 (IOP Publishing) · Reports on Progress in Physics (2013) in press
arxiv created 2012/11/05 · openalex publication_date 2012/12/14 · arxiv updated 2015/06/12 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In this report we show that a vacuum is a nonlinear optical medium and discuss what the optical phenomena are that should exist in the framework of the standard model of particle physics. We pay special attention to the low energy limit. The predicted effects for photons of energy smaller than the electron rest mass are of such a level that none have yet been observed experimentally. Progress in field sources and related techniques seem to indicate that in a few years vacuum nonlinear optics will be accessible to human investigation.