No abstract

Résumé We present the current status of the BMV experiment. Our apparatus is based on an up-todate resonant optical cavity coupled to a transverse magnetic field. We detail our data acquisition and analysis procedure which takes into account the symmetry properties of the raw data with respect to the orientation of the magnetic field and the sign of the cavity birefringence. The measurement result of the vacuum magnetic linear birefringence kCM presented in this paper was obtained with about 200 magnetic pulses and a maximum field of 6.5 T, giving a noise floor of about 8 × 10 −21 T −2 at 3σ confidence level.PACS. 12.20.Fv Experimental tests -78.20.Ls Magneto-optical effects -42.25.Lc Birefringence

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.

No abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we describe in detail the BMV (Biréfringence Magnétique du Vide) experiment, a novel apparatus to study the propagation of light in a transverse magnetic field. It is based on a very high finesse Fabry-Perot cavity and on pulsed magnets specially designed for this purpose. We justify our technical choices and we present the current status and perspectives. PACS. PACS-key discribing text of that key -PACS-key discribing text of that key

Recently, axionlike particle search has received renewed interest. In particular, several groups have started "light shining through a wall" experiments based on magnetic field and laser both continuous, which is very demanding in terms of detector background. We present here the 2sigma limits obtained so far with our novel setup consisting of a pulsed magnetic field and a pulsed laser. In particular, we have found that the axionlike particle two photons inverse coupling constant M is >8 x 10{5} GeV provided that the particle mass m{a} approximately 1 meV. Our results definitively invalidate the axion interpretation of the original PVLAS optical measurements with a confidence level greater than 99.9%.

Recently, axion-like particle search has received renewed interest, and several groups have started experiments. In this paper, we present the final results of our experiment on photon-axion oscillations in the presence of a magnetic field, which took place at LULI (Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation des Lasers Intenses, Palaiseau, France). Our null measurement allowed us to exclude the existence of axions with inverse coupling constant M > 9. × 10 5 GeV for low axion masses and to improve the preceding BFRT limits by a factor 3 or more for axion masses 1.1 meV < ma < 2.6 meV. We also show that our experimental results improve the existing limits on the parameters of a low mass hidden-sector boson usually dubbed "paraphoton" because of its similarity with the usual photon. We detail our apparatus which is based on the "light shining through the wall" technique. We compare our results to other existing ones.

We have searched for the regeneration of photons propagating in a transverse magnetic field. Such an effect would reveal the existence of light scalar or pseudoscalar particles such as the axion that couple to two photons.We obtain for this coupling the limit gaTr < 1.3 x lo6 GeV)-I, provided the axion mass m, 6 10m3 eV.