Measurement of the Cotton–Mouton effect in nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, and krypton with the Q & A apparatus

Abstract Experiments for vacuum birefringence and vacuum dichroism have been set up with high-finesse high magnetic experimental apparatuses, which seem to be ideal for small gaseous Cotton–Mouton effect (CME) measurements. PVLAS Collaboration has measured CMEs in krypton, xenon and neon at the wavelength of 1064 nm. In this Letter, we report on our measurement of CMEs in nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, and krypton at the same wavelength in a magnetic field B  = 2.3 T at pressure P  = 0.5–300 Torr and temperature T  = 295−298 K. Our results agree with the PVLAS results in the common cases.