Related papers: Cosmologically Screwy Light
We review evidence for a new phenomenon in the propagation of radio waves across the Universe, an anisotropic rotation of the plane of polarization not accounted for by conventional physics.
We discuss a new mechanism which could cause a rotation of polarization of electromagnetic waves due to magnetic fields on cosmological scales. The effect is due to the geometrical phase of Pancharatnam and Berry, and causes a corkscrew…
A systematic rotation of the plane of polarization of electromagnetic radiation propagating over cosmological distances has been claimed to be detected by Nodland and Ralston.Taking the finite rotating universe of Oszvath and Sch\"ucking as…
We report a systematic rotation of the plane of polarization of electromagnetic radiation propagating over cosmological distances. The effect is extracted independently from Faraday rotation, and found to be correlated with the angular…
The origin of the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray remains being a mystery. However, a considerable progress has been made in the past few years due to the good quality data recorded by current cosmic ray observatories. One of the recent…
The claim by Gurzadyan et al. that the cosmological sky is a weakly random one where "the random perturbation is a minor component of mostly regular signal" has given rise to a series of useful exchanges. The possibility that the Cosmic…
Scattering of electromagnetic waves lies at the heart of most experimental techniques over nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum, ranging from radio waves to optics and X-rays. Hence, deep insight into the basics of scattering theory…
We investigate the propagation of certain non-plane wave solutions to Maxwell's equations in both flat and curved spacetimes. We find that such solutions (or rather parts of them) exhibit accelerative behaviour, and in particular do not…
The circular Bragg phenomenon is the circular-polarization-state-selective reflection of light in a spectral regime called the circular Bragg regime. In continuation of an expository review on this phenomenon published in 2014, an album of…
The propagation of cosmic rays (CRs) in turbulent interstellar magnetic fields is typically described as a spatial diffusion process. This formalism predicts only a small deviation from an isotropic CR distribution in the form of a dipole…
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…
In a series of paper, it has been shown that the distribution of polarisation position angles for visible light from quasars is not random in extremely large regions of the sky. As explained in a recent article, the measurement of vanishing…
It is now well-known that vacuum polarisation in QED can lead to superluminal low-frequency phase velocities for photons propagating in curved spacetimes. In a series of papers, we have shown that this quantum phenomenon is dispersive and…
It is well known that spin angular momentum of light, and therefore that of photons, is directly related to their circular polarization. Naturally, for totally unpolarized light, polarization is undefined and the spin vanishes. However, for…
It has been known for a long time that light carries both linear and angular momenta parallel to the direction of propagation. However, only recently it has been pointed out that beams of light, under certain conditions, may exhibit a…
The propagation of free electromagnetic radiation in the field of a plane gravitational wave is investigated. A solution is found one order of approximation beyond the limit of geometrical optics in both transverse--traceless (TT) gauge and…
We provide a vivid demonstration of the mechanical effect of transverse spin momentum in an optical beam in free space. This component of the Poynting momentum was previously thought to be virtual, and unmeasurable. Here, its effect is…
We show that recent radio and optical observations of polarized radiation from well-resolved high redshift quasars and radio galaxies rule out the cosmological rotation of the plane of polarization claimed recently by Nodland and Ralston. A…
We report on an update of the test on the rotation of the plane of linear polarization for light traveling over cosmological distances, using a comparison between the measured direction of the UV polarization in 8 radio galaxies at z>2 and…
Spatially inhomogeneous fields of electromagnetic guided modes exhibit a complex of extraordinary dynamical properties such as the polarization-dependent transverse momentum, helicity-independent transverse spin, spin-associated…