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Detecting photon-photon scattering in vacuum at exawatt lasers

Daniele Tommasini·Albert Ferrando·Humberto Michinel·Marcos Seco
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Abstract

In a recent paper, we have shown that the QED nonlinear corrections imply a phase correction to the linear evolution of crossing electromagnetic waves in vacuum. Here, we provide a more complete analysis, including a full numerical solution of the QED nonlinear wave equations for short-distance propagation in a symmetric configuration. The excellent agreement of such a solution with the result that we obtain using our perturbatively-motivated Variational Approach is then used to justify an analytical approximation that can be applied in a more general case. This allows us to find the most promising configuration for the search of photon-photon scattering in optics experiments. In particular, we show that our previous requirement of phase coherence between the two crossing beams can be released. We then propose a very simple experiment that can be performed at future exawatt laser facilities, such as ELI, by bombarding a low power laser beam with the exawatt bump.

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Daniele Tommasini, Albert Ferrando, Humberto Michinel, Marcos Seco. 2008-02-01. Detecting photon-photon scattering in vacuum at exawatt lasers. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.77.042101

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