Measurement of the Cotton Mouton effect of water vapour

Optical Polarimetry for Fundamental Physics

Sensitive magneto-optical polarimetry was proposed by E. Iacopini and E. Zavattini in 1979 to detect vacuum electrodynamic non-linearity, in particular Vacuum Magnetic Birefringence (VMB). This process is predicted in QED via the fluctuation of electron–positron virtual pairs but can also be due to hypothetical Axion-Like Particles (ALPs) and/or MilliCharged Particles (MCP). Today ALPs are considered a strong candidate for Dark Matter. Starting in 1992 the PVLAS collaboration, financed by INFN, Italy, attempted to measure VMB conceptually following the original 1979 scheme based on an optical cavity permeated by a time-dependent magnetic field and heterodyne detection. Two setups followed differing basically in the magnet: the first using a rotating superconducting 5.5 T dipole magnet at the Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, Legnaro, Italy and the second using two rotating permanent 2.5 T dipole magnets at the INFN section of Ferrara. At present PVLAS is the experiment which has set the best limit in VMB reaching a noise floor within a factor 7 of the predicted QED signal: Δn(QED)=2.5×10−23 @ 2.5 T. It was also shown that the noise floor was due to the optical cavity and a larger magnet is the only solution to increase the signal to noise ratio. The PVLAS experiment ended at the end of 2018. A new effort, VMB@CERN, which plans to use a spare LHC dipole magnet at CERN with a new modified optical scheme, is now being proposed. In this review, a detailed description of the PVLAS effort and the comprehension of its limits leading to a new proposal will be given.

Low temperature Voigt effect in the terbium gallium garnet crystal

Magnetic linear birefringence and dichroism are investigated for the paramagnetic terbium gallium garnet (TGG) single crystal in the temperature range 8-100 K. The reciprocal nature is confirmed for the linear birefringence. Furthermore a theoretical model is validated that describes the intermixing of linear and circular birefringence. The ellipticity and rotation of the polarization ellipse are investigated in the light of these measurements. These otherwise minuscule magnetically induced effects are amplified at cryogenic temperatures and are determined by a phase-sensitive technique based on the Fourier decomposition of detected signal intensities. The correspondent measurements also allow us to determine the Curie-Weiss constant corroborating the presence of a magnetically frustrated spin system. Additionally we show how the Voigt geometry enables determining the direction of a magnetic field.