  The higher order quantum electrodynamics (QED) effect for vacuum pair
production has been searched without success since 1954. In this paper, we show
that the lowest order QED calculations for lepton pair vacuum production in
heavy-ion collisions are about 20$\%$ higher than the combined world-wide data
with a seven sigma-level of significance and the corresponding higher order QED
results are consistent with data. We claim the discovery of higher order effect
for the QED pair production, which settles the dust of previous debates for
several decades. The verification of higher order QED effect is a fundamental
scientific problem, which is an important milestone towards the nonperturbative
and nonlinear regime of QED vacuum.
