Related papers: Gravity and handedness of photons
It is well known that not every symmetry of a classical field theory is also a symmetry of its quantum version. When this occurs, we speak of quantum anomalies. The existence of anomalies imply that some classical Noether charges are no…
Vacuum polarization in QED in a background gravitational field induces interactions which {\it effectively} modify the classical picture of light rays as the null geodesics of spacetime. After a short introduction on the main aspects of the…
Newton's action at a distance gravitational law and Coulomb's action at a distance electrostatic law had to be reexamined in the light of field theories which originated from Maxwell's electrodynamics. These ideas were further modified with…
3-dimensional gravity coupled to Maxwell (or Klein-Gordon) fields is exactly soluble under the assumption of axi-symmetry. The solution is used to probe several quantum gravity issues. In particular, it is shown that the quantum…
We study the electromagnetic field equations on an arbitrary quantum curved background in the semiclassical approximation of Loop Quantum Gravity. The effective interaction hamiltonian for the Maxwell and gravitational fields is obtained…
As revealed by space-time probing, mechanics and field theory come out as complementary descriptions for motions in space-time. In particular, quantum fields exert a radiation pressure on scatterers which results in mechanical effects that…
Effects of the quantum gravity under Minkowski space-time background are considered. It is shown that despite the absence of the complete theory of quantum gravity, some concrete predictions could be made for the influence of the quantum…
Using the path-integral formalism, we show that photons possess a nontrivial quantum metric in momentum space. We derive the semiclassical action and equations of motion by taking into account the quantum metric. In media with a spatially…
Graviton-photon oscillation is the conversion of gravitational waves to electromagnetic waves and vice versa in the presence of a background electromagnetic field. We investigate this phenomenon in a cosmological scenario considering a…
Particle creation by strong and time-varying backgrounds is a robust prediction of quantum field theory. Another well-established feature of field theory is that classical symmetries do not always extend to the quantized theory. When this…
An intriguing consequence of quantum field theory is that vacuum is not empty space; it is full of quantum fluctuating electromagnetic fields, or virtual photons, corresponding to their zero-point energy, even though the average number of…
It is well known that the source-free Maxwell equations are invariant under electric-magnetic duality rotations, F --> F cos {\theta} + *F sin {\theta}. These transformations are indeed a symmetry of the theory in Noether sense. The…
The effective field theory of quantum gravity generically predicts non-locality to be present in the effective action, which results from the low-energy propagation of gravitons and massless matter. Working to second order in gravitational…
A satisfactory theory of quantum gravity will very likely require modification of our classical perception of space-time, perhaps by giving it a 'foamy' structure at scales of order the Planck length. This is expected to modify the…
In the presence of an electromagnetic (EM) field the space-time metrics are affected by the field potential. The principle of superposition, which usually rules EM fields, is no longer valid for the biggest fields and Maxwell's equations,…
We focus on the interaction of a plane gravitational wave with electromagnetic fields and we describe this interaction in the proper detector frame where, thanks to the introduction of Fermi coordinates, it is possible to refer to directly…
It is shown that quantum fluctuations due to a nontrivial gravitational background in the flat radiation dominated universe can play an important cosmological role generating nonvanishing cosmological global charge, e.g. baryon number,…
Quantum gravity is quite elusive at the experimental level; thus a lot of interest has been raised by recent searches for quantum gravity effects in the propagation of light from distant sources, like gamma ray bursters and active galactic…
In this paper we investigate graviton-photon oscillation in the presence of an external magnetic field in alternative theories of gravity. Whereas the effect of an effective refractive index for the electromagnetic radiation was already…
There are conflicting statements in the literature about the gravitational Faraday rotation of the plane of polarization of polarized electromagnetic radiation travelling through a gravitational wave. This issue is reconsidered using a…