Experimental perspectives in (low-energy) photon-photon scattering

The possibility of photon-photon scattering is a striking difference between classical and quantum electrodynamics. This genuinely quantum feature is made possible by the fluctuations of charged fields, and it makes quantum vacuum a nonlinear optical medium. Photon-photon scattering is thus a delicate probe into the structure of quantum electrodynamics and any departure from the expected behavior would be a powerful signal of "new physics". To date this process has never been observed – except as a radiative correction to other processes – and several experiments are trying to detect it at very low energy, in the scattering of real photons in powerful light beams off the virtual photons of intense magnetic fields. Here we briefly review the experimental state-of-the-art, with special emphasis on the PVLAS experiment, and we describe a new proposal to observe photon-photon scattering in the range 1 – 2 MeV.