Related papers: Detecting Chameleons: The Astronomical Polarizatio…
When it is polarised, a cell develops an asymmetric distribution of specific molecular markers, cytoskeleton and cell membrane shape. Polarisation can occur spontaneously or be triggered by external signals, like gradients of signalling…
Chameleon particles, which could explain dark energy, are in many ways similar to axions, suggesting that an axion helioscope can be used for chameleon detection. The distinguishing property of chameleon particles is that, unlike Standard…
We revisit the flux of chameleons (light scalar particles which could play a role in the dark energy phenomenon) produced in the interior of the Sun. Our novel analysis incorporates various important details and new processes that have…
Photon-photon interactions, as described by the standard Heisenberg-Euler interaction, can transform plane polarization of the CMB into circular polarization, in the period right after last scattering. We estimate the standard deviation of…
One of the most extraordinary manifestations of the coupling of the optical field and matter is the emission of light by charged particles passing through a dielectric medium: the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect. In this article, it is…
The photon-induced process of electron-positron pair creation in a strong homogeneous magnetic field, provided that the polarization of particles is arbitrary, has been considered. The polarization of a photon is described in terms of the…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are very light, neutral, spin zero bosons predicted by superstring theory. ALPs interact primarily with two photons and in the presence of an external magnetic field they generate photon-ALP oscillations and the…
The PVLAS collaboration has recently reported the observation of a rotation of the polarization plane of light propagating through a transverse static magnetic field. Such an effect can arise from the production of a light, m_A ~ meV,…
Conventional indirect dark matter (DM) searches look for an excess in the electromagnetic emission from the sky that cannot be attributed to known astrophysical sources, but its polarisation has not been explored to date. In this…
We investigate the effects of chameleon scalar field to the effective density and pressure of a dark matter halo. The pressure is generated from the chameleonic fifth force on the matter. We demonstrate that the thick-shell non-singular…
Marked correlations are reported between the ionization of the X-ray line spectra of normal OB stars, as observed by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and their optical spectral types. These correlations include the progressive weakening of…
In the present work, it is shown that a chameleon scalar field having a nonminimal coupling with dark matter can give rise to a smooth transition from a decelerated to an accelerated phase of expansion for the universe. It is surprising to…
Following work by Khoury and Weltman, we introduce a scalar field phi, the chameleon, which is conformally coupled to matter. That is, matter experiences a metric which is a conformal transform (parametrized by phi) of the Einstein metric.…
Recently, it was shown, that the absence of circular polarization of visible light from quasars, severely constrains the interpretation of axion like particles (ALPs) as a solution for the generation of the linear polarization. Furthermore,…
We study the field profile of a scalar field $\phi$ that couples to a matter fluid (dubbed a chameleon field) in the relativistic gravitational background of a spherically symmetric spacetime. Employing a linear expansion in terms of the…
We present new optical circular polarization measurements with typical uncertainties < 0.1% for a sample of 21 quasars. All but two objects have null circular polarization. We use this result to constrain the polarization due to…
Effective pseudoscalar-photon interaction(s) would induce a rotation of linear polarization of electromagnetic wave propagating with cosmological distance in various cosmological models. Pseudoscalar-photon interaction is proportional to…
This article presents an introduction to optical pumping, atomic polarization and the Hanle effect in weakly magnetized stellar atmospheres. Although the physical processes and the theoretical framework described here are of interest for…
Polarization is a basic property of light and is fundamentally linked to the internal geometry of a source of radiation. Polarimetry complements photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging analyses of sources of radiation and has made possible…
It was recently argued that the observed PVLAS anomaly can be explained by chameleon field theories in which large deviations from Newton's law can be avoided. Here we present the predictions for the dichroism and the birefringence induced…