Measurement of the Cotton-Mouton effect in nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, and krypton with the Q & A apparatus

TL;DR

This paper reports measurements of the Cotton-Mouton effect in various gases using a high-finesse magnetic apparatus, confirming previous results and expanding the data set for nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, and krypton.

Contribution

First measurements of the Cotton-Mouton effect in nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide gases at 1064 nm wavelength using a high-finesse apparatus.

Findings

Results agree with PVLAS measurements in common cases.

Measured CMEs across a range of pressures and gases.

Validated the experimental setup for small gaseous CME measurements.

Abstract

Experiments for vacuum birefringence and vacuum dichroism have been set up with high-finesse high magnetic experimental apparatuses, which seem to be ideal for small gaseous Cotton-Mouton effect (CME) measurements. PVLAS Collaboration has measured CMEs in krypton, xenon and neon at the wavelength of 1064 nm. In this Letter, we report on our measurement of CMEs in nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, and krypton at the same wavelength in a magnetic field B = 2.3 T at pressure P = 0.5-300 Torr and temperature T = 295-298 K. Our results agree with the PVLAS results in the common cases.