Light shining through walls

By J. Redondo, A. Ringwald. 2010

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Shining light through walls? At first glance this sounds crazy. However, very feeble gravitational and electroweak effects allow for this exotic possibility. Unfortunately, with present and near future technologies the opportunity to observe light shining through walls via these effects is completely out of the question. Nevertheless, there are quite a number of experimental collaborations around the globe involved in this quest. Why are they doing it? Are there additional ways of sending photons through opaque matter? Indeed, various extensions of the standard model of particle physics predict the existence of new particles called WISPs – extremely weakly interacting slim particles. Photons can convert into these hypothetical particles, which have no problems to penetrate very dense materials, and these can reconvert into photons after their passage – as if light was effectively traversing walls. We review this exciting field of research, describing the most important WISPs, the present and future experiments, the indirect hints from astrophysics and cosmology pointing to the existence of WISPs, and finally outlining the consequences that the discovery of WISPs would have.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8fde9654e33c380505d6f8b1860934e1e80db8a

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Citations in the corpus

The type IIB string axiverse and its low-energy phenomenology (2012, methodology): “The next generation of these experiments is designed to reach a sensitivity of giγ ∼ 10−11 GeV−1 → fai/Ciγ ∼ 108 GeV [4], thus starting to probe the region of interest for the possible explanation of the anomalous features in AGN spectra reported above.”
Physics potential of the International Axion Observatory (IAXO) (2019, background): “This approach includes the search for galactic axion dark matter [29] and the photon regeneration experiments (“shining light through a wall”) [30, 32, 35].”
An Introduction to Particle Dark Matter (2019, background): “For example, References [46,47] give the following different values: Axion laboratory searches include light-shining-through-wall experiments, see for example, References [48,49] that exploit the process: Additional searches are conducted based on microwave cavities [50] and helioscopes [51].”
Conceptual design of the International Axion Observatory (IAXO) (2014, background): “The diverse experimental approaches to search for axions can be classified in three main categories, complementary on many levels [14, 15]: haloscopes [16] look for the relic axions potentially composing our dark matter galactic halo, helioscopes [16] look for axions emitted at the core of the sun, ”
Any Light Particle Search II -- Technical Design Report (2013, methodology): “Again, for the LSW-setup of ALPS-II, the square of Eq.”
Exploring the Role of Axions and Other WISPs in the Dark Universe (2012, background): “Light-shining-through-walls searches Intriguingly, the ALPs parameter region required for the explanation of the above mentioned astro puzzles can also be partially probed by purely laboratory based light-shining-through-walls (LSW) experiments [117, 118, 119], where laser photons are sent along a s”
The four basic ways of creating dark matter through a portal (2011, unknown): “[35] (see also [30]) where constraints on the mixing parameter (our , their χ) and hidden photon mass are summarized.”
Towards a new generation axion helioscope (2011, background): “ration experiments (“light shining through a wall”), which are foreseen to reach the gaγ ∼ 10−11 GeV−1 ballpark for ma .1 meV, but are unlikely to become sensitive to realistic axion models (see Ref. [44] for a recent review). Finally, axions are copiously produced in stellar interiors. By far the b”
Dark matter, dark energy, and alternate models: A review (2017, background): “That's a range of masses of over 75 orders of magnitude (Zioutas et al., 2004; Redondo and Ringwald, 2011; Feng, 2010).”