Abstract

Optical nonlinearity was demonstrated at the University of Michigan with the generation of the second harmonic of ruby in quartz. It gave birth to nonlinear spectroscopy that deepened our understanding of the structure of ponderable materials. A similar experiment will be attempted in vacuum where a 100PW laser will be focused in vacuum to reveal its nonlinearity up to its breakdown in e+e−, with the goal to understand the vacuum texture.

© 2011 Optical Society of America