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A: Fachverband Atomphysik
A 4: Quantum Effects (QED) (joint session Q/A)
A 4.7: Vortrag
Montag, 6. März 2023, 12:30–12:45, F442
Influence of quantum vacuum fluctuations on the causality of field correlations within nonlinear crystals — •Cristofero Oglialoro1, Frieder Lindel2, Fabian Spallek1, and Stefan Yoshi Buhmann1 — 1University of Kassel, Germany — 2University of Freiburg, Germany
A major consequence of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is that, even though the expectation value of a quantum field vanishes, its ground state exhibits so-called quantum vacuum fluctuations. In recent years, experimental progress has made it possible to study the ground state fluctuations through electro-optic sampling by measuring changes in the polarisation of a laser pulse passing through a nonlinear crystal. The rotation of the polarisation can be attributed to the interaction of the pulse with the quantum vacuum. Macroscopic QED allows to describe the changes in this vacuum structure induced by the interaction with dielectric macroscopic bodies and provides a theoretical framework to survey its physical signatures. Studies of the correlation of the field of two laser pulses in a nonlinear crystal have even shown that points causally disconnected according to special relativity can exhibit a nonvanishing correlation function due to the interaction with the vacuum fluctuations [1]. We want to further investigate the influence of the quantum vacuum on the causality of correlations within dielectric macroscopic bodies and the possibility to explore the space-time structure of vacuum correlations in the altered metric provided by a nonlinear crystal in analogy to the behaviour in curved space-time.
[1] F. F. Settembrini, et al., Nat. Commun. 13, 3383 (2022).