2014
DOI: 10.1103/physrevd.89.125003
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Vacuum refractive indices and helicity flip in strong-field QED

Abstract: Vacuum birefringence is governed by the amplitude for a photon to flip helicity or polarisation state in an external field. Here we calculate the flip and non-flip amplitudes in arbitrary plane wave backgrounds, along with the induced spacetime-dependent refractive indices of the vacuum. We compare the behaviour of the amplitudes in the low energy and high energy regimes, and analyse the impact of pulse shape and energy. We also provide the first lightfront-QED derivation of the coefficients in the Heisenberg-… Show more

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Cited by 142 publications
(214 citation statements)
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References 72 publications
(150 reference statements)
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“…Again many variants of this fluctuation-based descriptions exist [14][15][16]. The fact that both descriptions are equivalent is a manifestation of the optical theorem (for a recent discussion in the context of pair production, see [17,18]). …”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Again many variants of this fluctuation-based descriptions exist [14][15][16]. The fact that both descriptions are equivalent is a manifestation of the optical theorem (for a recent discussion in the context of pair production, see [17,18]). …”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Unfortunately, the dependence of this non-perturbative phenomenon on the field profile E(t, r) away from the constant field approximation is still mostly terra incognita. There are many results for fields which depend on one coordinate only, such as space x or time t (see, e.g., [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]), one of the light-cone coordinates x ± = t ± x (see, e.g., [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]), or other linear combinations of x and t [29]. In these cases, the underlying (Dirac or Klein-Fock-Gordon) equation simplifies to an ordinary differential equation (allowing for a WKB approach, for example, see also [30][31][32][33][34]).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Furthermore, it is certainly interesting to study vacuum birefringence and photon diffraction effects in high-intensity laser beams prepared in a distinct higher Laguerre-or Hermite-Gaussian mode. So far, theoretical studies of these effects typically assumed the high-intensity laser beams to be prepared in the fundamental Gaussian mode [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]; for an exception cf. Ref.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%