Electro-optical sampling of quantum vacuum fluctuations in dispersive dielectrics

Abstract: Electro-optical sampling has been recently used to perform spectrally-resolved measurements of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations. In order to understand which information on the ground state of an interacting system can be acquired thanks to this technique, in this paper we will develop the quantum theory of electro-optical sampling in arbitrary dispersive dielectrics. Our theory shows that a measure of the time correlations of the vacuum fluctuations effectively implements an ellipsometry measurement on the quantum vacuum, allowing to access the frequency-dependent dielectric function. We discuss consequences of these results on the possibility to use electro-optical sampling to probe the population of ground-state virtual photons in the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime.