We present the current status of the BMV experiment. Our apparatus is based on an up-to-date resonant optical cavity coupled to a transverse magnetic field. We detail our data acquisition and analysis procedure which takes into account the symmetry p
roperties of the raw data with respect to the orientation of the magnetic field and the sign of the cavity birefringence. The measurement result of the vacuum magnetic linear birefringence k_mathrm{CM}$ presented in this paper was obtained with about 200 magnetic pulses and a maximum field of 6.5,T, giving a noise floor of about $8 times 10^{-21}$,T$^{-2}$ at $3sigma$ confidence level.
We report the observation of the Inverse Cotton-Mouton Effect (ICME) i.e. a magnetization induced in a medium by non resonant linearly polarized light propagating in the presence of a transverse magnetic field. We present a detailed study of the ICME
in a TGG crystal showing the dependence of the measured effect on the light intensity, the optical polarization, and on the external magnetic field. We derive a relation between the Cotton-Mouton and Inverse Cotton-Mouton effects that is roughly in agreement with existing experimental data. Our results open the way to applications of the ICME in optical devices.
In this letter we calculate the Inverse Cotton-Mouton Effect (ICME) for the vacuum following the predictions of Quantum ElectroDynamics. We compare the value of this effect for the vacuum with the one expected for atomic systems. We finally show that
ICME could be measured for the first time for noble gases using state-of-the-art laser systems and for the quantum vacuum with near-future laser facilities like ELI and HiPER, providing in particular a test of the nonlinear behaviour of quantum vacuum at intensities below the Schwinger limit of 4.5x10^33 W/m^2.
In this paper we present a review of the existing data on interferential mirror birefringence. We also report new measurements of two sets of mirrors that confirm that mirror phase retardation per reflection decreases when mirror reflectivity increas
es. We finally developed a computational code to calculate the expected phase retardation per reflection as a function of the total number of layers constituting the mirror. Different cases have been studied and we have compared computational results with the trend of the experimental data. Our study indicates that the origin of the mirror intrinsic birefringence can be ascribed to the reflecting layers close to the substrate.
In this paper, we present the final results of our experiment on photon-axion oscillations in the presence of a magnetic field, which took place at LULI (Laboratoire pour lUtilisation des Lasers Intenses, Palaiseau, France). Our null measurement allo
wed us to exclude the existence of axions with inverse coupling constant $M>9.times 10^5$ GeV for low axion masses and to improve the preceding BFRT limits by a factor 3 or more for axion masses $1.1 {meV} <m_a<2.6 {meV}$. We also show that our experimental results improve the existing limits on the parameters of a low mass hidden-sector boson usually dubbed paraphoton because of its similarity with the usual photon.
