Related papers: Bending of a light ray within a dispersive medium …
We explore the nature of the classical propagation of light through media with strong frequency-dependent dispersion in the presence of a gravitational field. In the weak field limit, gravity causes a redshift of the optical frequency,…
In most analytical studies of light ray propagation in curved spacetimes around a gravitating object surrounded by a medium, it is assumed that the medium is a cold nonmagnetized plasma. The distinctive feature of this environment is that…
The deflection of light rays near gravitating objects can be influenced not only by gravity itself but also by the surrounding medium. Analytical studies of such effects are possible within the geometrical optics approximation, where the…
Both the non-homogeneous slowness of electromagnetic waves in gravitational fields and the frequency red shift contribute to the gravitational light bending. This twofold contribution explains the measured deflection of light rays by the…
Geometric optics effectively describes the propagation of electromagnetic waves when the wavelength is much smaller than the characteristic length scale of the medium, making wave phenomena like diffraction negligible. As a result, light…
The influence of the medium on the gravitational deflection of light rays is widely discussed in literature for the simplest non-trivial case: cold non-magnetized plasma. In this article, we generalize these studies to the case of an…
Recent experiments on ultra slow light in strongly dispersive media by several research groups reporting slowing down of the optical pulses down to speeds of a few metres per second encourage us to examine the intriguing possibility of…
The interaction between a light pulse, traveling in air, and a generic linear, non-absorbing and dispersive structure is analyzed. It is shown that energy conservation imposes a constraint between the group velocities of the transmitted and…
The deflection of a ray of light passing close to a gravitational mass, is generally calculated from the null geodesic which the light ray (photon) follows. However, there is an alternate approach, where the effect of gravitation on the ray…
Light refraction, i.e. the bending of the path of a light wave at the interface between two different dielectric media, is ubiquitous in optics. Refraction arises from the different speed of light and is unavoidable in continuous media…
The relativistic theory of the time- and position-dependent energy and momentum densities of light in glasses and other low-loss dispersive media, where different wavelengths of light propagate at different phase velocities, has remained a…
The new method of invariant definition of the measurable angle of light deflection in the static central symmetric gravitational field is suggested. The predicted pure gravitational contribution to the deflection angle slightly differs from…
We theoretically investigate the propagation of light in the presence of a homogeneous gravitational field. To model this, we derive the solutions of the wave equation in Rindler spacetime, which account for gravitational redshift and light…
The physical deflection angle of a light ray propagating in a space-time supplied with an asymptotically flat metric has to be expressed in terms of the impact parameter.
Pulsed Bessel beams of light propagating in free-space experience diffraction effects that resemble those of anomalous dispersion on pulse propagation. It is then shown that a pulsed Bessel beam in a normally dispersive material can remain…
We determine the angle of deflection of light by the gravitational field inside and outside a spherical body with a homogeneous mass density. We show that the largest deflections, which can be measured by weak gravitational lensing, are in…
The optical medium analogy of a radiation field generated by either an exact gravitational plane wave or an exact electromagnetic wave in the framework of general relativity is developed. The equivalent medium of the associated background…
We describe the statistical properties of light rays propagating though a random sea of gravity waves and compare with the case for scalar metric perturbations from density inhomogeneities. For scalar fluctuations the deflection angle grows…
In this letter a new formula for light deflection is derived using only physically observable concepts. The general result is specialized to cosmological perturbation theory and expressed in terms of gauge--invariant perturbation variables.…
The high speed of light in vacuo together with the weakness of Earth gravity rules out any experimental detection of gravitational deflection of light on the laboratory length scale. Recent advances in coherent optics that produce ultra…