Upcoming and planned experiments combining increasingly intense lasers and energetic
particle beams will access new regimes of nonlinear, relativistic, quantum effects. This …

The field of laser-matter interaction traditionally deals with the response of atoms, molecules,
and plasmas to an external light wave. However, the recent sustained technological …

The wave nature of matter is a key ingredient of quantum physics and yet it defies our
classical intuition. First proposed by Louis de Broglie a century ago, it has since been …

When exposed to intense electromagnetic fields, the quantum vacuum is expected to exhibit
properties of a polarizable medium akin to a weakly nonlinear dielectric material. Various …

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 …

Particle production due to external fields (electric, chromoelectric, or gravitational) requires
evolving an initial state through an interaction with a time-dependent background, with the …

These notes provide a pedagogical introduction to the theoretical study of vacuum
polarization effects in strong electromagnetic fields as provided by state-of-the-art high …

Vacuum birefringence produces a differential phase between orthogonally polarized
components of a weak electromagnetic probe in the presence of a strong electromagnetic …

We consider stimulated pair production employing strong-field QED in a high-intensity laser
background. In an infinite plane wave, we show that light-cone quasi-momentum can only …

A long-standing prediction of quantum electrodynamics, yet to be experimentally observed,
is the interaction between real photons in vacuum. As a consequence of this interaction, the …