Tag Archive for 'Quantum vacuum'

Illustration of photon-photon scattering in the laboratory: two green petawatt lasers beams collide at the focus with a third red beam to polarise the quantum vacuum; this allows a fourth blue laser beam to be generated, with a unique direction and color, which conserves momentum and energy. Image credit: Zixin (Lily) Zhang.

Physicists Study How Light Interacts with Quantum Vacuum

Jun 5, 2025 by News Staff

Physicists have achieved the first-ever real-time, 3D simulations of how intense laser beams alter the quantum vacuum — a state once assumed to be...

The Unruh effect predicts a thermal response for an accelerated detector moving through the vacuum. Gooding et al. propose an interferometric scheme to observe an analogue of the circular Unruh effect using a localized laser coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate. Image credit: University of Nottingham.

Physicists Propose New Method for Observing Hypothetical Unruh Effect

Nov 23, 2020 by News Staff

The Unruh effect was described by Stephen Fulling in 1973, Paul Davies in 1975, and William Unruh in 1976. Sometimes called the Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect,...

Macleod et al analyzed the properties of vacuum Cherenkov radiation in strong laser pulses and the magnetic field around a pulsar. Image credit: Gerd Altmann.

High-Velocity Charged Particles Emit Cherenkov Radiation in Quantum Vacuum

May 6, 2019 by News Staff

According to new research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, charged particles traveling through empty space can emit Cherenkov radiation...