Related papers: Planck scale still safe from stellar images
The quantum to classical transition of fluctuations in the early universe is still not completely understood. Some headway has been made incorporating the effects of decoherence and the squeezing of states, though the methods and procedures…
A non-minimally coupled scalar field can have, in principle, a negative effective Planck mass squared which depends on the scalar field. Surprisingly, an isotropic and homogeneous cosmological universe with a non-minimally coupled scalar…
String theory suggests the existence of a minimum length scale. An exciting quantum mechanical implication of this feature is a modification of the uncertainty principle. In contrast to the conventional approach, this generalised…
Unconstrained partial-wave amplitudes obtained at discrete energies from fits to complete sets of experimental data may not vary smoothly with energy, and are in principle non-unique. We demonstrate how this behavior can be ascribed to the…
The mixing of the photon with a hypothetical sterile paraphotonic state would have consequences on the cosmological propagation of photons. The absence of distortions in the optical spectrum of distant Type Ia supernov\ae allows to extend…
If spacetime undergoes quantum fluctuations, an electromagnetic wavefront will acquire uncertainties in direction as well as phase as it propagates through spacetime. These uncertainties can show up in interferometric observations of…
The possibility of a symmetry between gravitating and anti-gravitating particles is examined. The properties of the anti-gravitating fields are defined by their behavior under general diffeomorphisms. The equations of motion and the…
Planck scale physics represents a future challenge, located between particle physics and general relativity. The Planck scale marks a threshold beyond which the old description of spacetime breaks down and conceptually new phenomena must…
Partially coherent light is abundant in many physical systems, and its propagation properties are well understood. Here we extend current theory of propagation of partially coherent light beams to the field of coherent diffusion. Based on a…
The suspicion that the existence of a minimal uncertainty in position measurements violates Lorentz invariance seems unfounded. It is shown that the existence of such a nonzero minimal uncertainty in position is not only consistent with…
The existence of a fundamental ultraviolet scale, such as the Planck scale, may lead to modifications of the dispersion relations for particles at high energies, in some scenarios of quantum gravity. We apply effective field theory to this…
Contrary to what is often stated, a fundamental spacetime discreteness need not contradict Lorentz invariance. A causal set's discreteness is in fact locally Lorentz invariant, and we recall the reasons why. For illustration, we introduce a…
Any variation of the fundamental physical constants, and more particularly of the fine structure constant, $\alpha$, or of the mass of the electron, $m_e$, would affect the recombination history of the Universe and cause an imprint on the…
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 set up a covariant renormalisation group equation on a foliated spacetime which preserves background diffeomorphism symmetry. As a first application of the new formalism, we study the effect of quantum fluctuations in Lorentz symmetry…
In the last decade or so there has been debate over the possibility that the fuzzy quantum nature of spacetime might decohere wavefronts emanating from very distant sources. Consequences of that could be "blurred" or "faded" images of…
We explore the possibility that well known properties of the parity operator, such as its idempotency and unitarity, might break down at the Planck scale. Parity might then do more than just swap right and left polarized states and reverse…
Combining the quantum scale invariance with the absence of new degrees of freedom above the electroweak scale leads to stability of the latter against perturbative quantum corrections. Nevertheless, the hierarchy between the weak and the…
The hypothesis of a discrete fabric of the universe--the "Planck scale"--is always on stage, since it solves mathematical and conceptual problems in the infinitely small. However, it clashes with special relativity, which is designed for…
The suspicion that the existence of a minimal uncertainty in position measurements violates Lorentz invariance seems unfounded. It is shown that the existence of such a nonzero minimal uncertainty in position is not only consistent with…