Photon-hadron and photon-photon collisions in ALICE

A review is given on photon-hadron and photon-photon collisions in the ALICE experiment. The physics motivation for studying such reactions is outlined, and the results obtained in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions in Run 1 of the LHC are discussed. The improvement in detector rapidity coverage due to a newly added detector system is presented. The ALICE perspectives for data taking in LHC Run II are summarised.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, Proceedings PHOTON 2015 Conference, 15-19 June, 2015, Budker Institute, Novosibirs

Virtual photon-photon scattering

Based on analyticity, unitarity, and Lorentz invariance the contribution from hadronic vacuum polarization to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon is directly related to the cross section of e^+e^- --> hadrons. We review the main difficulties that impede such an approach for light-by-light scattering and identify the required ingredients from experiment. Amongst those, the most critical one is the scattering of two virtual photons into meson pairs. We analyze the analytic structure of the process gamma^* gamma^* --> pi pi and show that the usual Muskhelishvili-Omnes representation can be amended in such a way as to remain valid even in the presence of anomalous thresholds.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings for the International Workshop on e^+e^- collisions from phi to psi 2013, Rome, Italy, September 9-12, 201

Full Quantum Analysis of Two-Photon Absorption Using Two-Photon Wavefunction: Comparison with One-Photon Absorption

For dissipation-free photon-photon interaction at the single photon level, we analyze one-photon transition and two-photon transition induced by photon pairs in three-level atoms using two-photon wavefunctions. We show that the two-photon absorption can be substantially enhanced by adjusting the time correlation of photon pairs. We study two typical cases: Gaussian wavefunction and rectangular wavefunction. In the latter, we find that under special conditions one-photon transition is completely suppressed while the high probability of two-photon transition is maintained.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Quantum nondemolition detection of a propagating microwave photon

The ability to nondestructively detect the presence of a single, traveling photon has been a long-standing goal in optics, with applications in quantum information and measurement. Realising such a detector is complicated by the fact that photon-photon interactions are typically very weak. At microwave frequencies, very strong effective photon-photon interactions in a waveguide have recently been demonstrated. Here we show how this type of interaction can be used to realize a quantum nondemolition measurement of a single propagating microwave photon. The scheme we propose uses a chain of solid-state 3-level systems (transmons), cascaded through circulators which suppress photon backscattering. Our theoretical analysis shows that microwave-photon detection with fidelity around 90% can be realized with existing technologies

Measuring photon-photon interactions via photon detection

The strong non-linearity plays a significant role in physics, particularly, in designing novel quantum sources of light and matter as well as in quantum chemistry or quantum biology. In simple systems, the photon-photon interaction can be determined analytically. However, it becomes challenging to obtain it for more compex systems. Therefore, we show here how to measure strong non-linearities via allowing the sample to interact with a weakly pumped quantized leaking optical mode. We found that the detected mean-photon number versus pump-field frequency shows several peaks. Interestingly, the interval between neighbour peaks equals the photon-photon interaction potential. Furthermore, the system exhibits sub-Poissonian photon statistics, entanglement and photon switching with less than one photon. Finally, we connect our study with existing related experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Photon number conservation and photon interference

The group theoretical aspect of the description of passive lossless optical four-ports (beam splitters) is revisited. It is shown through an example, that this approach can be useful in understanding interferometric schemes where a low number of photons interfere. The formalism is extended to passive lossless optical six-ports, their SU(3)-theory is outlined.Comment: Contribution at "Classical and Quantum Interference" workshop in RCO, Olomouc, Oct. 25-26 2001. A corrected versio