Publisher's Synopsis
Scattering of light by light is a fundamental process arising at the quantum level through vacuum fluctuations. This short book will explain how, remarkably enough, this quantum process can be described in terms of classical quantities, which are the fusion cross sections. The description is derived from general principles such as causality, unitarity, Lorentz and gauge symmetries. Thus, the reader will be introduced to a rigorous formulation of these fundamental concepts, as well as their physical interpretation, in the context of light-by-light scattering. The book will also demonstrate how these principles emerge from quantum loop calculations of light-by-light scattering within the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. The final chapter will give a survey of timely applications of the light self-interaction. They range from non-linear optics to precision measurements of the muon anomaly and the dispersion of rays in cosmic microwave background (CMB), to the very recent discovery of light-by-light scattering at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
