Related papers: Inquiring electromagnetic quantum fluctuations abo…
Whether the space where we live is a globally orientable manifold $M_3$, and whether the local laws of physics require that $M_3$ be equipped with a canonical orientation, are among the unsettled questions in cosmology and quantum field…
One important global topological property of a spacetime manifold is orientability. It is widely believed that spatial orientability can only be tested by global journeys around the Universe to check for orientation-reversing closed paths.…
In general relativity, cosmology and quantum field theory, spacetime is assumed to be an orientable manifold endowed with a Lorentz metric that makes it spatially and temporally orientable. The question as to whether the laws of physics…
We show that a nontrivial topologies of the spatial section of Minkowski space-time allow for motion of a charged particle under quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. This is a potentially observable effect of these…
We study the role that both vacuum fluctuations and vacuum entanglement of a scalar field play in identifying the spacetime topology, which is not prescribed from first principles---neither in general relativity or quantum gravity. We…
We argue, in the context of Ads/CFT correspondence, that the degree of entanglement on the CFTs side determines the orientation of space and time on the dual global spacetime. That is, the global spacetime dual to entangled copies of field…
The global topology of spacetime, though invisible to local curvature measurements, leaves signatures on the correlation functions of quantum fields. We study these signatures using an Unruh-DeWitt particle detector operating in…
After a review of the existing theory of non-inertial frames and mathematical observers in Minkowski space-time we give the explicit expression of a family of such frames obtained from the inertial ones by means of point-dependent Lorentz…
In the framework of relativistic positioning systems in Minkowski space-time, the determination of the inertial coordinates of a user involves the {\em bifurcation problem} (which is the indeterminate location of a pair of different events…
It is more than a century-old concept that the Minkowski spacetime is flat. From the pure geometric point of view, we explicitly address the issue of whether a noncommutative Minkowski spacetime is flat or not. In the framework of the…
We investigate the transition probability of a Unruh-deWitt particle detector evolving in flat space and in a wormhole spacetime, in various scenarios. In Minkowski space, we look at the response of the detector on trajectories having…
We review connections between the metric of spacetime and the quantum fluctuations of fields. In particular, we discuss the finding that the spacetime metric can be expressed entirely in terms of the 2-point correlators of the fluctuations…
We analyze the decoherence of a particle's spatial superposition moving along a stationary worldline through the Minkowski vacuum. The particle is modeled via an internal degree of freedom that couples to a scalar field, and an external…
If the Universe has non-trivial spatial topology, observables depend on both the parameters of the spatial manifold and the position and orientation of the observer. In infinite Euclidean space, most cosmological observables arise from the…
This conference talk elaborates on a recently discovered mapping procedure by which classical orbits and path integrals for the motion of a point particle in flat space can be transformed correctly into those in curved space. This procedure…
The spatial localization of quantum states plays a central role in condensed-matter phenomena, ranging from many-body localization to topological matter. Building on the dissipation-fluctuation theorem, we propose that the localization…
We prove that, under suitable assumptions, operationally motivated data completely determine a space-time in which the quantum systems can be interpreted as evolving. At the same time, the dynamics of the quantum system is also determined.…
Spacetime manifolds that are not time orientable play a key role in a gravitational explanation of quantum theory. Such manifolds allow topology change, but also have fascinating additional properties such as net charge from source-free…
This review aims to cover the central aspects of current research in cosmic topology from a topological and observational perspective. Beginning with an overview of the basic concepts of cosmology, it is observed that though a determinant…
Contrary to established beliefs, spacetime may not be time-orientable. By considering an experimental test of time orientability it is shown that a failure of time-orientability of a spacetime region would be indistinguishable from a…