Related papers: Light incoherence due to background space fluctuat…
I review the discovery of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The underlying theory and the implications for cosmology are reviewed, and I describe the prospects for future progress.
Optical interferometry provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Through direct observation of rotationally distorted photospheres at sub-milliarcsecond scales, we are now able to…
Random fluctuations in the tune, beam offsets and beam size in the presence of the beam-beam interaction are shown to lead to significant particle diffusion and emittance growth in hadron colliders. We find that far from resonances high…
The method of photon distribution function (PDF) is used to study fluctuations of light beams propagating through a turbulent atmosphere. Our analysis concerns the regime of saturated fluctuations. The focus is on the phenomena of beam…
In this paper, a geometrical interpretation of light diffraction is given using an infinity of fluctuating geodesics that represent paths of least time in an homogeneous space. Without using the wave theory, we provide a geometrical…
Over the last few years a certain class of dark-energy models decaying inversely proportional to the square of the horizon distance emerged on the basis either of Heisenberg uncertainty relations or of the uncertainty relation between the…
The atmospheric scintillation of stars is the main limitation of the accuracy of ground-based photometry of astronomical objects. This becomes particularly noticeable for a study of a variability with amplitudes on the order to thousandths…
We present a numerical study of the spatial coherence of light that is radiated from a dilute ensemble of atoms. The spatial coherence is established as a result of the collective (cooperative) coupling of the atoms to the light, and is…
It is known that a spatially partially coherent light field produces better imaging contrast compared to a spatially coherent field and that the contrast increases as the spatial coherence length of the field becomes smaller. The transverse…
Gravitational microlensing within the Galaxy offers the prospect of probing the details of distant stellar sources, as well as revealing the distribution of compact (and potentially non-luminous) masses along the line-of-sight. Recently, it…
Light propagating in an optically thick sample experiences multiple scattering. It is now known that interferences alter this propagation, leading to an enhanced backscattering, a manifestation of weak localization of light in such diffuse…
One of the most common expectations of a quantum theory of gravity is that space-time is uncertain or fluctuating at microscopic scales, making it a stochastic medium for particle propagation. Particles traversing this space-time may…
The origin of dark energy driving the accelerated expansion of the universe is still mysterious. We explore the possibility that dark energy fluctuates, resulting in spatial correlations. Due to these fluctuations, the Hubble rate itself…
We develop a discrete model to account for the effects of inhomogeneities on the redshift of photons. Using this model we compute the probability distribution of the observed redshift respect to the background value, obtaining that its…
The large scale distribution of galaxies in the universe displays a complex pattern of clusters, super-clusters, filaments and voids with sizes limited only by the boundaries of the available samples. A quantitative statistical…
It is shown that varying speed of light cosmology follows from a string-inspired minimal length uncertainty relation. Due to the reduction of the available phase space volume per quantum mode at short wavelengths, the equation of state of…
We consider the effect on the propagation of light of inhomogeneities with sizes of order 10 Mpc or larger. The Universe is approximated through a variation of the Swiss-cheese model. The spherical inhomogeneities are void-like, with…
We present the first steps needed for an analysis of the perturbations that occur in the cosmology associated with the conformal gravity theory. We discuss the implications of conformal invariance for perturbative coordinate gauge choices,…
We study matter-wave interferometry in the presence of a stochastic background of gravitational waves. It is shown that if the background has a scale-invariant spectrum over a wide bandwidth (which is expected in a class of inflationary…
We argue that quantum-gravitational fluctuations in the space-time background give the vacuum non-trivial optical properties that include diffusion and consequent uncertainties in the arrival times of photons, causing stochastic…