Effects of heavy bosonic excitations on QED vacuum

P. ARIAS; J. GAMBOA; H. FALOMIR; F. MÉNDEZ

MODERN PHYSICS LETTERS A

World Scientific Publishing Co.

Lugar: New Jersey; Año: 2009 vol. 24 p. 1289 - 1299

0217-7323

We discuss the contribution of axion-like excitations (ALE) to the vacuum birefringencein the limit m_A > omega, where m_A is the mass of the excitation and omega the energy of test photons interacting with an external (intense) magnetic field. The relevance of this termwith respect to the QED contribution depends on the ratio g_A/m_A and, from presentbounds on the mass and the coupling constant g_A, we find that in the present low energyregime, it ranges from 10^14 to 10^2 suggesting an interesting alternative to explore.