Vacuum Pair Production Experiments

Testing the response of charged particles and the quantum vacuum to extreme fields is predicted to give rise to fundamental and unexplored natural phenomena. Among these are finding a self-consistent solution to the trajectory of a single electron (so-called ‘radiation reaction’), pair production from the quantum vacuum and photon-photon scattering in violation of the superposition principle of classical theory.

Experiments are currently in the planning and validation phase with experiments planned at both accelerator/laser combinations and all-optical experiments which aim to probe different parameter spaces. The challenge in all cases is to detect a weak signal against a strong background. Recent developments will be presented for both the all laser based efforts very high values of the laser strength parameter a0 as part of the FOR2783 "Quantumvacuum" research grouping with moderate gamma energies.

These efforts will be compared and contrasted with complementary efforts at high energy accelerators at moderate values of a0.