Speaker
Description
Exotic atoms constitute a unique platform to explore fundamental interactions and symmetries. In particular, kaonic atoms are a great tool to investigate quantum electrodynamics in extreme electromagnetic fields. While conventionally exploited to investigate low-energy QCD through hadronic shifts and widths, kaonic atoms also offer a unique opportunity to probe bound-state QED (BSQED) in a previously unexplored regime. Owing to the large kaon mass, the Bohr radius is drastically reduced compared to ordinary atoms, generating electric fields at the kaon orbit that approach or exceed the critical scale associated with the Schwinger limit.
The recent measurement of Kaonic Fluorine and Neon X-ray transitions performed by SIDDHARTA-2 at Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati opens the possibility of testing strong-field QED (SFQED) effects in a strong Coulomb field, enabling precision studies of higher-order vacuum polarization and radiative corrections in the strong-field regime, where the validity of the perturbative approach begins to fail.
By measuring transition energies in light and medium-Z kaonic atoms with sub-eV precision and comparing them with advanced BSQED calculations, SIDDHARTA-2 achieves sensitivity to possible deviations from perturbative predictions. This contribution presents the recent Kaonic Fluorine and Neon results, and the prospects for probing Strong Field QED physics effects in the vicinity of the Schwinger limit using kaonic atoms as unique exotic atoms laboratories.