Related papers: Subvacuum effects on light propagation
It is commonly agreed that the electromagnetic vacuum is not empty but filled with virtual photons. This leads to effects like Lamb shift and spontaneous emission. Here we argue that if the vacuum has virtual photons it might mean that it…
Quantum gravity effects are traditionally tied to short distances and high energies. In this essay we argue that, perhaps surprisingly, quantum gravity may have important consequences for the phenomenology of the infrared. We center our…
We show that during stochastic beam attenuation in double slit experiments, there appear unexpected new effects for transmission factors below $a\lesssim10^{-4}$, which can eventually be observed with the aid of weak measurement techniques.…
Motivated by analogue models of classical and quantum field theory in curved spacetimes and their recent experimental realizations, we consider wave scattering processes of dispersive fields exhibiting two extra degrees of freedom. In…
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…
The effects of the Dirac sea of the nucleons are investigated within a covariant model of the hadronic interaction. We extend the usual Mean Field Approximation and present a procedure to deal with divergences which are proportional to…
In this speculative note some of the conceivable options of supercavitation in the vacuum of quantized field theory are discussed. The resulting modes of propagation could in principle be faster than the velocity of light in unbounded…
We study the traversal times of electromagnetic pulses across dispersive media with negative dielectric permittivity ($\varepsilon$) and magnetic permeability ($\mu$) parameters. First we investigate the transport of optical pulses through…
We present a pedagogic derivation of the electromagnetic field established in a dielectric material by an impinging external field. We consider the problem from the point of view of the physical mechanism involved at the microscopic level.…
A change in the sign of the frequency of a wave between two inertial reference frames corresponds to a reversal of the phase velocity. Yet from the point of view of the relation $E=\hbar\omega$, a positive quantum of energy apparently…
We study a supersymmetric model in curved background spacetime. We calculate the effective action and the vacuum expectation value of the energy momentum tensor using a covariant regularization procedure. A soft supersymmetry breaking…
The four wavenumbers associated with planewave propagation in a Faraday chiral medium (FCM) with relatively huge magnetoelectric coupling give rise to enhanced possibilities for negative-phase-velocity propagation and therefore negative…
Searches for dispersive effects in the propagation of light at cosmological distances have been touted as sensitive probes of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) and of theories of quantum gravity. Frequency-dependent time lags between…
Free motion of a quantum particle with the wave function entirely comprised of plane waves with non-negative momenta may be accompanied by negative probability current, an effect called quantum backflow. The effect is weak and fragile, and…
Non-Perturbative Quantum Field Theory has played an important role in the study of phenomena where a fermion condensate can appear under certain physical conditions. The familiar phenomenon of electric superconductivity, the color…
The effects of light propagation in constant magnetic and electric backgrounds are considered in the framework of the effective action approach. We use the exact analytic series representation for the one-loop effective action of QED and…
The presence of charge promotes the propensity of a rotating black hole to support the propagation of electromagnetic plane waves with negative phase velocity (NPV) in its ergosphere, whether the Kerr-Newman or the Kerr-Sen metric…
In recent years there has been great interest towards optical cavities as a tool to manipulate the properties and phases of embedded quantum materials. Due to the Purcell effect, a cavity changes the photon phase space and thus the rate of…
A canonical formalism is presented which allows for investigations of quantum radiation induced by localized, smooth disturbances of classical background fields by means of a perturbation theory approach. For massless, non-selfinteracting…
We consider the vacuum decay by electron-positron pair production in spatially homogeneous, time dependent electric fields by means of quantum kinetic equations. Our focus is on the impact of various pulse shapes as envelopes of oscillating…