The PVLAS experiment: detecting vacuum magnetic birefringence

The PVLAS collaboration is presently assembling a new apparatus to detect vacuum magnetic birefringence. This property is related to the structure of the QED vacuum and is predicted by the Euler-Heisenberg-Weisskopf effective Lagrangian. It can be detected by measuring the ellipticity acquired by a linearly polarised light beam propagating through a strong magnetic field. Here we report results of a scaled-down test setup and briefly describe the new PVLAS apparatus. This latter one is in construction and is based on a high-sensitivity ellipsometer with a high-finesse Fabry-Perot cavity (> 4×105) and two 0.8 m long 2.5 T rotating permanent dipole magnets. Measurements with the test setup have improved by a factor 2 the previous upper bound on the parameter Ae, which determines the strength of the nonlinear terms in the QED Lagrangian: Ae(PVLAS) < 3.3 × 10−21 T−2 95% c.l.