Probing vacuum birefringence under a high-intensity laser field with gamma-ray polarimetry at the GeV scale

Probing vacuum structures deformed by high intense fields is of great interest in general. In the context of quantum electrodynamics (QED), the vacuum exposed by a linearly polarized high-intensity laser field is expected to show birefringence. We consider the combination of a 10 PW laser system to pump the vacuum and 1 GeV gamma-rays to probe the birefringent effect. The vacuum birefringence can be measured via the polarization flip of the probe gamma-rays. We discuss the design of the gamma-ray polarimeter and then evaluate the measurability of the reduction of the degree of linear polarization due to the appearance of birefringence. We found that the measurement is indeed feasible given a realistic set of laser parameters and achievable pulse statistics.