Related papers: Lines of sight through randomly oriented flattened…
Optical quasar spectra can be used to trace variations of the fine-structure constant alpha. Controversial results that have been published in last years suggest that in addition to to wavelength calibration problems systematic errors might…
Quantitative evaluation of some recent 'slow light' experiments based on coherent population oscillations (CPO) shows that they can be more simply interpreted as saturable absorption phenomena. Therefore they do not provide an unambiguous…
One-dimensional optical waveguiding is revisited using the electromagnetic deduction of Fresnel formulas relating the incident, reflected, and transmitted waves on the abrupt interface between two different optical media. Throughout the…
The spherometer used for measuring radius of curvature of spherical surfaces is explicitly based on a geometric relation unique to circles and spheres. We present an alternate approach using coordinate geometry, which reproduces the…
In this Chapter, we give a brief review of the state of the art of theoretical and experimental studies of quantum fluids of light. Such systems consist of ensembles of photons that acquire a finite mass from spatial confinement or…
If the Galaxy contains ~10^{11}M_sol in cold gas clouds of ~Jovian mass and \~AU size, these clouds will act as converging lenses for optical light, magnifying background stars at a detectable rate. The resulting light curves can resemble…
The concept of turnaround surface in an accelerating universe is generalized to arbitrarily large deviations from spherical symmetry, to close the gap between the idealized theoretical literature and the real world observed by astronomers.…
We propose a model, based on a quantum stochastic differential equation (QSDE), to describe the scattering of polarized laser light by an atomic gas. The gauge terms in the QSDE account for the direct scattering of the laser light into…
We investigate the spectro-photometric variability of quasars due to lensing of small mass substructure (from several tens to several hundreds solar masses). The aim of this paper is to explore the milli/microlensing influence on the flux…
We propose a new strategy to probe the power spectrum on large scales using galaxy peculiar velocities. We explore the properties of surveys that cover only two small fields in opposing directions on the sky. Surveys of this type have…
We present a new explanation for the very wide absorption features in quasar spectra. In our model, a very wide absorption feature will originate, when the line of sight crosses a bubble wall tangentially. We demonstrate this on the quasar…
Progress in astronomy comes from interpreting the signals encoded in the light received from distant objects: the distribution of light over the sky (images), over photon wavelength (spectrum), over polarization angle, and over time…
At low redshift, it is possible to combine spectroscopic information of galaxies with their luminosity or angular diameter distance to directly measure the projection of peculiar velocities (PV) along the line-of-sight. A PV survey probing…
Large surveys of the local Universe have shown that galaxies with different intrinsic properties, such as colour, luminosity and morphological type display a range of clustering amplitudes. Galaxies are therefore not faithful tracers of the…
On small scales the observable Universe is highly inhomogeneous, with galaxies and clusters forming a complex web of voids and filaments. The optical properties of such configurations can be quite different from the perfectly smooth…
We consider the scattering of lightlike matter in the presence of a heavy scalar object (such as the Sun or a Schwarzschild black hole). By treating general relativity as an effective field theory we directly compute the nonanalytic…
The similarity of quasar line spectra has been taken as an indication that the emission line clouds have preferred parameters, suggesting that the environment is subject to a fine tuning process. We show here that the observed spectrum is a…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to map directly the distribution of dark matter in the universe and to measure cosmological parameters. This cosmic-shear technique is based on the measurement of the weak distortions that…
We propose a new method to search for light (pseudo-)scalar particles in the spectra of compact astrophysical objects such as magnetars, pulsars, and quasars. On accounts of compact astrophysical objects having intense magnetic fields…
X-ray scattering patterns from emerging single particle experiments have commonly many missing or contaminated pixels. This complicates different analyses including projections on Fourier or other basis functions (for noise suppression,…