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arXiv · 2610.39867

Dark-field Search for Quantum Vacuum Signals in the Low-Energy Regime

Aimé Matheron·Michal Šmíd·Felix Karbstein·Sebastian Göde·Willi Hippler·Robert Lötzsch·Michal Andrzejewski·Sergey Antipov·Carsten Baehtz·Victorien Bouffetier·Erik Brambrink·Jakub Bulička·Samuele Di Dio Cafiso·Rafael Celestre·Jaromír Chalupský·Thomas E. Cowan·Jörg Grenzer·Travis Griffin·Věra Hájková·Jens Hauser·Peter Hilz·Hauke Höppner·Alžběta Horynová·Lingen Huang·Oliver Humphries·Šimon Jelínek·Libor Juha·Pooyan Khademi·Alejandro Laso-García·Masruri Masruri·Nikita Medvedev·Motoaki Nakatsutsumi·Gerhard G. Paulus·Jennifer Popp·Thomas R. Preston·Isabella Probst·Sripati V. Rahul·Thomas Roth·Felipe C. Salgado·Roland Sauerbrey·Alexander Sävert·Hans-Peter Schlenvoigt·Jan Patrick Schwinkendorf·Frank Seiboth·Georgiy Shoulga·Minxue Tang·Abha Thazhathe Peedika·Monika Toncian·Toma Toncian·Vojtěch Vozda·Edgar Weckert·Colin Wessel·Jan Wild·Ulf Zastrau·Matt Zepf
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Abstract

We report on the experimental details of a dark-field search for light-by-light scattering signals performed at the High Energy Density (HED) instrument of the European XFEL (EuXFEL) in a pump-probe type experiment colliding the EuXFEL beam with the 300-TW-class near-infrared Relativistic Laser at XFEL (ReLaX) at a center-of-mass photon energy of $ω_\star = 116\,\mathrm{eV}$. Especially in combination with polarization filtering, the dark-field concept allows the signal-to-background ratio to be significantly enhanced and both polarization channels to be recorded. This work elaborates on the experimental setup and the diagnostics used, from the per-shot spatiotemporal-overlap diagnostics, via the polarizing beam splitter, to the characterization of the residual background. Moreover, it provides details on the start-to-end simulations of the setup used for analysis. Accumulating 2751 pump-probe collisions, no excess above background is observed, and an upper limit on the light-by-light scattering cross section of $7\times10^{4}$ times the QED prediction at a 95% confidence level is derived. This is the most stringent bound on low-energy light-by-light scattering achieved to date, representing an improvement by ten orders of magnitude upon previous experimental limits.

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Aimé Matheron, Michal Šmíd, Felix Karbstein, Sebastian Göde, Willi Hippler, Robert Lötzsch, Michal Andrzejewski, Sergey Antipov, Carsten Baehtz, Victorien Bouffetier, Erik Brambrink, Jakub Bulička, Samuele Di Dio Cafiso, Rafael Celestre, Jaromír Chalupský, Thomas E. Cowan, Jörg Grenzer, Travis Griffin, Věra Hájková, Jens Hauser, Peter Hilz, Hauke Höppner, Alžběta Horynová, Lingen Huang, Oliver Humphries, Šimon Jelínek, Libor Juha, Pooyan Khademi, Alejandro Laso-García, Masruri Masruri, Nikita Medvedev, Motoaki Nakatsutsumi, Gerhard G. Paulus, Jennifer Popp, Thomas R. Preston, Isabella Probst, Sripati V. Rahul, Thomas Roth, Felipe C. Salgado, Roland Sauerbrey, Alexander Sävert, Hans-Peter Schlenvoigt, Jan Patrick Schwinkendorf, Frank Seiboth, Georgiy Shoulga, Minxue Tang, Abha Thazhathe Peedika, Monika Toncian, Toma Toncian, Vojtěch Vozda, Edgar Weckert, Colin Wessel, Jan Wild, Ulf Zastrau, Matt Zepf. 2026-10-29. Dark-field Search for Quantum Vacuum Signals in the Low-Energy Regime. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39867

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