The Effects of Stress Tensor Fluctuations upon Focusing
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
2009-11-10 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory
Quantum Physics
Abstract
We treat the gravitational effects of quantum stress tensor fluctuations. An operational approach is adopted in which these fluctuations produce fluctuations in the focusing of a bundle of geodesics. This can be calculated explicitly using the Raychaudhuri equation as a Langevin equation. The physical manifestation of these fluctuations are angular blurring and luminosity fluctuations of the images of distant sources. We give explicit results for the case of a scalar field on a flat background in a thermal state.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0307043,
title = {The Effects of Stress Tensor Fluctuations upon Focusing},
author = {J. Borgman and L. H. Ford},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0307043},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
26 pages, 1 figure, new material added in Sect. III and in Appendices B and C