Related papers: Photon Mass and Very Long Baseline Interferometry
Relativistic bending in the vicinity of a massive body is characterized only by the post-Newtonian parameter $\gamma$ within the standard parameterized post-Newtonian formalism, which is unity in General Relativity. Aiming at estimating…
Photon is the fundamental quantum of electromagnetic fields, whose mass, $m_{\gamma}$, should be strictly zero in Maxwell's theory. But not all theories adopt this hypothesis. If the rest mass of the photon is not zero, there will be an…
The Sun's gravitational field deflects the apparent positions of close objects in accordance with the formulae of general relativity. Optical astrometry is used to test the prediction, but only with the stars close to the Sun and only…
In the standard model of particle physics, photons are mass-less particles with a particular dispersion relation. Tests of this claim at different scales are both interesting and important. Experiments in territory labs and several…
Efforts to place limits on deviations from canonical formulations of electromagnetism and gravity have probed length scales increasing dramatically over time.Historically, these studies have passed through three stages: (1) Testing the…
The gravitational time delays of macro-lenses can be used to constrain the rest mass of the photon with high accuracy. Assuming a point-mass $+$ external shear lens model, we prove that an upper limit of the photon mass can be derived…
We have used the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) at 43, 23 and 15 GHz to measure the solar gravitational deflection of radio waves among four radio sources during an 18-day period in October 2005. Using phase-referenced radio interferometry…
Geodetic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) data are capable of measuring the light deflection caused by the gravitational field of the Sun and large planets with high accuracy. The parameter $\gamma$ of the parametrized…
While the deflection of light is achromatic in General Relativity, it is not always so in several new-physics models (e.g. certain quantum-gravity and string-inspired models, models with nonminimal photon-gravity coupling or with massive…
We study the frequency shift of photons generated by rotating gravitational sources in the framework of curvature based Extended Theories of Gravity. The discussion is developed considering the weak-field approximation. Following a…
We study the effects of a finite mass for the photon on its propagation in a weak gravitational field. In particular, we analyse the gravitational time delay, also known as the Shapiro effect. We work in isotropic coordinates in the…
We consider the possibility to measure the quantum decoherence using gravitational wave interferometers. Gravitational wave interferometers create the superposition state of photons and measure the interference of the photon state. If the…
One of the cornerstones of modern physics is Einstein's special relativity, with its constant speed of light and zero photon mass assumptions. Constraint on the rest mass m_{\gamma} of photons is a fundamental way to test Einstein's theory,…
General relativity predicts that gravitational lensing near black holes will produce narrow "photon rings" on images. Building on recent work of Johnson, Lupsasca et al. focusing on circular rings, I calculate the long-baseline…
Electromagnetic methods recently proposed for detecting gravitational waves modify the Michelson phase shift analysis (historically employed for special relativity). We suggest that a frequency modulation analysis is more suited to general…
A hypothetical photon mass, $m_{\gamma}$, can produce a frequency-dependent vacuum dispersion of light, which leads to an additional time delay between photons with different frequencies when they propagate through a fixed distance. The…
The photon zero-mass hypothesis has been investigated for a long time using the frequency-dependent time delays of radio emissions from astrophysical sources. However, the search for a rest mass of the photon has been hindered by the…
The photon is the paradigm for a massless particle and current experimental tests set severe upper bounds on its mass. Probing such a small mass, or equivalently large Compton wavelength, is challenging at laboratory scales, but planetary…
The effects of a nonzero photon rest mass can be incorporated into electromagnetism in a simple way using the Proca equations. In this vein, two interesting implications regarding the possible existence of a massive photon in nature, i.e.,…
Photons, as quanta of electromagnetic fields, determine the electromagnetic properties of an extremely hot and dense medium. Considering the properties of photons in the interacting medium of charged particles, we explicitly calculate the…