Vacuum QED effects detected around Neutron Stars?
Just over a week ago I received an interesting call from a science magazine reporter. He asked me what do I think about the recent discovery of the Quantum Electrodynamic (QED) produced vacuum birefringence around neutron stars. It was an interesting surprise as my colleague Jeremey Heyl at the University of British Columbia and I had what seemed to be a bizarre prediction back in around 1998, a prediction which seems to have been verified almost 2 decades later. So, what is the effect and what was measured?