18 research outputs found
Observability of an induced electric dipole moment of the neutron from nonlinear QED
It has been shown recently that a neutron placed in an external quasistatic
electric field develops an induced electric dipole moment
due to quantum fluctuations in the QED vacuum. A
feasible experiment which could detect such an effect is proposed and described
here. It is shown that the peculiar angular dependence of
on the orientation of the neutron spin leads to a
characteristic asymmetry in polarized neutron scattering by heavy nuclei. This
asymmetry can be of the order of for neutrons with epithermal
energies. For thermalized neutrons from a hot moderator one still expects
experimentally accessible values of the order of . The contribution of
the induced effect to the neutron scattering length is expected to be only one
order of magnitude smaller than that due to the neutron polarizability from its
quark substructure. The experimental observation of this scattering asymmetry
would be the first ever signal of nonlinearity in electrodynamics due to
quantum fluctuations in the QED vacuum