PVLAS (Polarizzazione del Vuoto con LASer, "polarization of the vacuum with laser") aims to carry out a test of quantum electrodynamics and possibly detect dark matter at the Department of Physics and National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Ferrara, Italy.
Experiments began in 2001 at the INFN Laboratory in Legnaro (Padua, Italy) and continue today with new equipment.
Second, to date, the evidence for zero-point quantum fluctuations relies entirely on the observation of the Casimir effect, which applies to photons only.
PVLAS deals with the fluctuations of virtual charged particle-antiparticle pairs (of any nature, including hypothetical millicharged particles) and therefore the structure of fermionic quantum vacuum: to leading order, it would be a direct detection of loop diagrams.
[6] Data taken with an upgraded setup excluded the previous magnetic rotation in 2008[7] and set limits on photon-photon scattering.