Related papers: How stable is the photon?
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 best upper bounds on the masses of stable and unstable light neutrinos derive from the upper bound on the total mass density, as inferred from the lower limit $t_0> 13$ Gyr on the dynamical age of the Universe: If the Universe is…
Working with the assumption of non-zero photon mass and a trajectory that is described by the non geodesic world line of a spinning top we find, by deriving new astrophysical bounds, that this assumption is in contradiction with current…
If the photon possessed an electric charge or a magnetic moment, light waves propagating through magnetic fields would acquire new quantum mechanical phases. For a charged photon, this is an Aharonov-Bohm phase, and the fact that we can…
The precise value of the neutron lifetime is of fundamental importance to particle physics and cosmology. The neutron lifetime recently obtained, 878.5 +/- 0.7stat +/- 0.3sys s, is the most accurate one to date. The new result for the…
Spontaneous decay of a single photon is a notoriously inefficient process in nature irrespective of the frequency range. We report that a quantum phase-slip fluctuation in high-impedance superconducting waveguides can split a single…
We posit a second massless photon, uncoupled to known forms of matter but undergoing Lorentz non-invariant velocity mixing with ordinary photons. Our speculation within a speculation suffers from the sin of implausibility but enjoys the…
At present, the strongest upper limit on $\sum m_{\nu}$, the sum of neutrino masses, is from cosmological measurements. However, this bound assumes that the neutrinos are stable on cosmological timescales, and is not valid if the neutrino…
The electron would decay into a photon and neutrino if the law of electric charge conservation is not respected. Such a decay would cause vacancy in closed shells of atoms giving rise to emission of x-rays and Auger electrons. Experimental…
The decay of photon by the influence of magnetic field is considered. It is shown here that if the photon energy is grater than 1 MeV then photon can decay electron positron pair, but if it remains below 1 MeV then photon decays into…
The talk consists of three parts. ``History'' briefly describes the emergence and evolution of the concept of photon during the first two decades of the 20th century. ``Mass'' gives a short review of the literature on the upper limit of the…
The influence of static gravitational field on frequency, wave-length and velocity of photons and on the energy levels of atoms and nuclei is considered in the most elementary way. The interconnection between these phenomena is stressed.
The carrier or medium of electromagnetic waves has been vainly searched for many years, and now it has been caught after the establishment of the dynamic equations in photon gas. The photon's rest mass has been estimated from the cosmic…
In this work, we establish the existence conditions and a universal upper bound on the radius of stable photon spheres (SPS) outside the event horizons of static, spherically symmetric, asymptotically flat black holes surrounded by matter…
We explore, mostly using data from solar neutrino experiments, the hypothesis that the neutrino mass eigenstates are unstable. We find that, by combining $^8$B solar neutrino data with those on $^7$Be and lower-energy solar neutrinos, one…
We have arrived at tight constraints on the photon charge, giving comparable bounds, one based on the dominance by dark energy at the present epoch, and the other based on the requirement that early universe nucleosynthesis not be affected…
Existing limits on the non-radiative decay of one neutrino to another plus a massless particle (e.g., a singlet Majoron) are very weak. The best limits on the lifetime to mass ratio come from solar neutrino observations, and are $\tau/m…
The dark photon is a new gauge boson whose existence has been conjectured. It is dark because it arises from a symmetry of a hypothetical dark sector comprising particles completely neutral under the Standard Model interactions. Dark though…
Despite the fact that the solar neutrino flux is now well-understood in the context of matter-affected neutrino mixing, we find that it is not yet possible to set a strong and model-independent bound on solar neutrino decays. If neutrinos…
It was recently suggested that the discrepancy between two methods of measuring the lifetime of the neutron may be a result of an unseen decay mode into a dark matter particle which is almost degenerate with the neutron. We explore the…