Enhancing quantum vacuum signatures with tailored laser beams

Abstract: We demonstrate that tailored laser beams provide a powerful means to make quantum vacuum signatures in strong electromagnetic fields accessible in experiment. Typical scenarios aiming at the detection of quantum vacuum nonlinearities at the high-intensity frontier envision the collision of focused laser pulses. The effective interaction of the driving fields mediated by vacuum fluctuations gives rise to signal photons encoding the signature of quantum vacuum nonlinearity. Isolating a small number of signal photons from the large background of the driving laser photons poses a major experimental challenge. The main idea of the present work is to modify the far-field properties of a driving laser beam to exhibit a field-free hole in its center, thereby allowing for an essentially background free measurement of the signal scattered in the forward direction. Our explicit construction makes use of a peculiar far-field/focus duality.