Eur. Phys. J. D (2014) 68: 16
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2013-40725-9

Regular Article

Vacuum magnetic linear birefringence using pulsed fields: status of the BMV experiment

Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses (UPR 3228, CNRS-UPS-UJF-INSA), 31400 Toulouse Cedex, France

^a e-mail: carlo.rizzo@lncmi.cnrs.fr

Received: 18 November 2013
Published online: 23 January 2014

Abstract

We present the current status of the BMV experiment. Our apparatus is based on an up-to-date resonant optical cavity coupled to a transverse magnetic field. We detail our data acquisition and analysis procedure which takes into account the symmetry properties of the raw data with respect to the orientation of the magnetic field and the sign of the cavity birefringence. The measurement result of the vacuum magnetic linear birefringence k_CM presented in this paper was obtained with about 200 magnetic pulses and a maximum field of 6.5 T, giving a noise floor of about 8 × 10^-21 T^-2 at 3σ confidence level.