Related papers: Polarization Diffusion from Spacetime Uncertainty
Measurements of the polarization angle and orientation of cosmological radio sources may be used to search for unusual effects in the propagation of light through the universe. Recently, Nodland and Ralston (astro-ph/9704196) have claimed…
We consider emission of a photon by an electron in the field of a strong laser wave. Polarization effects in this process are important for a number of physical problems. We discuss a probability of this process for linearly polarized laser…
Templates for polarised emission from Galactic foregrounds at frequencies relevant to Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarisation experiments are obtained by modelling the Galactic Magnetic Field (GMF) on large scales. This work extends…
In papers on primary state diffusion (Percival 1994, 1995), numerical estimates suggested that fluctuations in the space-time metric on the scale of the Planck time (10^-44s) could be detected using atom interferometers. In this paper we…
The temperature fluctuations and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are now a well-known probe of the Universe at an infant age of 400,000 years. During the transit to us from the surface of last scattering, the CMB…
Primordial gravitational waves leave a characteristic imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in the form of $B$-mode polarization. Photons are also deflected by large scale gravitational waves which intervene between the source…
We study the transverse propagation of photons in a magnetized vacuum considering radiative corrections in the one-loop approximation. The dispersion equation is modified due to the magnetized photon self-energy in the transparency region…
Standard models describing the radiation transfer of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) through Compton scattering predict that cosmological scalar perturbations at linear order are not able to source V and B polarization modes. In this…
We discuss some striking properties of photons propagating in a cold axion condensate oscillating coherently in time with a frequency $1/m_a$. Three effects are discussed in this contribution: (a) due to the time dependence of the…
Description of detection and emission in terms of the photon localization is discussed. It is shown that the standard representation of plane waves of photons should be revised to take into consideration the boundary conditions caused by…
We introduce a stochastic multi-photon dynamics on reciprocal space. Assuming isotropy, we derive the diffusion limit for a tagged photon to be a nonlinear Markov process on frequency. The nonlinearity stems from the stimulated emission. In…
We investigate the propagation of electromagnetic waves through materials displaying a non-linear Hall effect. The coupled Maxwell-Boltzmann equations for traveling waves can be mapped onto ordinary differential equations that resemble…
Gravitational lensing due to the large-scale distribution of matter in the cosmos distorts the primordial Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and thereby induces new, small-scale $B$-mode polarization. This signal carries detailed information…
Quantum fluctuations in spacetime can, in some cases, lead to distortion in astronomical images of faraway objects. In particular, a stochastic model of quantum gravity predicts an accumulated fluctuation in the path length $\Delta L$ with…
Interstellar polarization from aligned dust grains can be measured both in transmission at visible and near-infrared wavelengths and in emission at far-infrared and sub-mm wavelengths. These observations can help predict the behavior of…
Partial polarization is the manifestation of the correlation between two mutually orthogonal transverse field components associated with a light beam. We show both theoretically and experimentally that the origin of this correlation can be…
The polarization measurement is an important tool to probe the prompt emission mechanism in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The synchrotron photons can be scattered by cold electrons in the outflow via Compton scattering processes. The observed…
We evaluate the large scale polarization of the cosmic microwave background induced, via Thomson scattering prior to decoupling, by nearly scale-invariant spectra of scalar and tensor metric perturbations, such as those predicted by most…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations effectively measure the basic properties of the universe during the recombination epoch. CMB measurements fix the distance to the surface of last scatter, the sound horizon of the…
We try to go beyond the geometrical optics approximation, by showing that a massless polarized particle allows a wide class of non minimal interactions with an arbitrary gravitational field. One specific example of a curvature-dependent…