QED vacuum fluctuations and induced electric dipole moment of the neutron

Abstract

Quantum fluctuations in the QED vacuum generate nonlinear effects, such as peculiar induced electromagnetic fields. In particular, we show here that an electrically neutral particle, possessing a magnetic dipole moment, develops an induced electric dipole-type moment with unusual angular dependence, when immersed in a quasistatic, constant external electric field. The calculation of this effect is done in the framework of the Euler-Heisenberg effective QED Lagrangian, corresponding to the weak field asymptotic expansion of the effective action to one-loop order. It is argued that the neutron might be a good candidate to probe this signal of nonlinearity in QED.