Related papers: Light incoherence due to background space fluctuat…
We investigate the propagation of light through a plasma on a background Kerr spacetime via a Hamiltonian formulation. The behaviour of light when propagating through a vacuum and through a plasma is not the same; the convolution of…
The radiation pressure coupling with vacuum fluctuations gives rise to energy damping and decoherence of an oscillating particle. Both effects result from the emission of pairs of photons, a quantum effect related to the fluctuations of the…
The propagation of $\gamma$ rays over very large distances provides new insights on the intergalactic medium and on fundamental physics. On their path to the Earth, $\gamma$ rays can annihilate with diffuse infrared or optical photons of…
We consider a cosmological model starting from (1) the(1+3+6)-dimensional space-times consisting of the outer space (the 3-dimensional expanding section) and the inner space (the 6-dimensional section) and reaching (2) the Friedmann model…
We present the first calculation of coherent backscattering with inelastic scattering by saturated atoms. We consider the scattering of a quasi-monochromatic laser pulse by two distant atoms in free space. By restricting ourselves to…
Interstellar turbulence has implications for the dispersal and mixing of the elements, cloud chemistry, cosmic ray scattering, and radio wave propagation through the ionized medium. This review discusses the observations and theory of these…
There are two possible causes of variability in gravitationally lensed quasars: intrinsic fluctuations of the quasar and ``microlensing'' by compact objects along the line of sight. If disentangled from each other, microlens-induced…
The spatial coherence of an atomic wavepacket can be detected in the scattered photons, even when the center-of-mass motion is in the quantum coherent superposition of two distant, non-overlapping wave packets. Spatial coherence manifests…
We argue that, in order to obtain decoherence of spacetime, we should consider quantum conformal metric fluctuations of spacetime. This could be the required environment in the problem of selfmeasurement of spacetime in quantum gravity.
Fluctuations in light absorption by atoms are observed by applying laser light on rubidium atoms and measuring the transmitted light intensity fluctuations. These fluctuations are spontaneous noise, which are generic to photon atom…
Extra-galactic sources of photons have been used to constrain space-time quantum fluctuations in the Universe. In these proposals, the fundamental "fuzziness" of distance caused by space-time quantum fluctuations has been directly…
Mesoscopic physics deals with three fundamental issues: quantum coherence, fluctuations and correlations. Here we analyze these issues for atom optics, using a simplified model of an assembly of atoms (or detectors, which are particles with…
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…
We consider an interferometer based on the concept of induced coherence, where two photons that originate in different second-order nonlinear crystals can interfere. We derive a complementarity relationship that links the first-order…
While it is generally assumed that several light beams propagate independently in a refracting medium, the exception of laser beams may be extended to usual time-incoherent light provided that conditions of space-coherence are fulfilled.…
Strong interaction between the light field and an atom is often achieved with cavities. Recent experiments have used a different configuration: a propagating light field is strongly focused using a system of lenses, the atom being supposed…
Star-forming galaxies which are too faint to be detected individually produce intensity fluctuations in the cosmic background light. This contribution needs to be taken into account as a foreground when using the primordial signal to…
Partially coherent light beams are encountered both in classical and in quantum optics. Their coherence properties generally depend on the correlation properties of their sources. In this paper, we propose a technique for controlling the…
At Planck-scale, spacetime is "foamy" due to quantum fluctuations predicted by quantum gravity. Here we consider the possibility of using spacetime foam-induced phase incoherence of light from distant galaxies and gamma-ray bursters to…
How does inhomogeneity affect our interpretation of cosmological observations? It has long been wondered to what extent the observable properties of an inhomogeneous universe differ from those of a corresponding…