Related papers: Observational Evidence Against Birefringence Over …
Measurements of the polarization angle and orientation of cosmological radio sources may be used to search for unusual effects in the propagation of light through the universe. Recently, Nodland and Ralston (astro-ph/9704196) have claimed…
Nodland and Ralston (astro-ph/9704196) claim evidence for a wavelength-independent cosmic birefringence. Although it has been shown (astro-ph/9704247, astro-ph/9704263) that the data analysed did not support this conclusion, the possibility…
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 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…
We point on a different possible explanation of the observations reported recently by Nodland and Ralston, PRL 78 (1997) 3043 [astro-ph/9704196]. The dipole anisotropy of the polarization of radiation from the distant radio sources can be…
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…
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…
It is proved that the field of a gravitational lens induces no rotation in the polarization vector of electromagnetic radiation, in agreement with the previous literature, but with a different approach. The result is generalized to the case…
The possibility that there is some Cosmic Polarization Rotation (CPR), i.e. that the polarization angle rotates while a photon travels in vacuum over large distances, is important for at least two reasons: first, the polarization angle…
A recent paper (Nodland and Ralston, PRL 78, 3043, astro-ph/9704196) claims to have detected evidence for birefringence in the propagation of radio waves across cosmological distances. In order to assess the statistical significance of…
A recent study of the rotation of the plane of polarization of light from 160 cosmological sources claims to find significant evidence for cosmological anisotropy. We point out methodological weaknesses of that study, and reanalyze the same…
The theory of general relativity, for which we celebrate the centennial at this Symposium, is based on the Einstein equivalence principle. This principle could be violated through a pseudoscalar-photon interaction, which would also produce…
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…
We review the methods used to test for the existence of cosmological birefringence, i.e. a rotation of the plane of linear polarization for electromagnetic radiation traveling over cosmological distances, which might arise in a number of…
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.
The observation of redshift-dependent coherent orientations of quasar polarisation vectors over cosmological distances in some regions of the sky is reviewed. Based on a good-quality sample of 355 measured quasars, this observation seems to…
We use the observed polarisation properties of a sample of 26 powerful radio galaxies and radio-loud quasars to constrain the conditions in the Faraday screens local to the sources. We adopt the cosmological redshift, low-frequency radio…
Possible violations of fundamental physical principles, e.g. the Einstein equivalence prin- ciple on which all metric theories of gravity are based, including general relativity (GR), would lead to a rotation of the plane of polarization…
The standard axion-like particle explanation of the observed large-scale coherent orientations of quasar polarisation vectors is ruled out by the recent measurements of vanishing of circular polarisation. We introduce a more general…
Based on a new sample of 355 quasars with significant optical polarization and using complementary statistical methods, we confirm that quasar polarization vectors are not randomly oriented over the sky with a probability often in excess of…