Laserlab-Europe Talk: Towards the detection of vacuum birefringence
Speaker: Gerhard Paulus (Helmholtz Institute Jena, Germany) Strong electromagnetic fields polarize vacuum such that it becomes birefringent. Not surprisingly, the effect is tiny, even if petawatt-class lasers are used for inducing the effect and X-ray lasers for probing it. Quite obviously, the performance of the required X-ray polarimeters is the decisive bottleneck: an extinction ratio of 1011 or […]