Related papers: Faster than Light Photons in Gravitational Fields …
A number of general issues relating to superluminal photon propagation in gravitational fields are explored. The possibility of superluminal, yet causal, photon propagation arises because of Equivalence Principle violating interactions…
The causal properties of curved spacetime, which underpin our sense of time in gravitational theories, are defined by the null cones of the spacetime metric. In classical general relativity, it is assumed that these coincide with the light…
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…
Photons propagating in curved spacetime may, depending on their direction and polarisation, have velocities exceeding the ``speed of light'' c. This phenomenon arises through vacuum polarisation in QED and is a tidal gravitational effect…
The effective action for QED in curved spacetime includes equivalence principle violating interactions between the electromagnetic field and the spacetime curvature. These interactions admit the possibility of superluminal yet causal photon…
The nature of superluminal photon propagation in the gravitational field describing radiation from a time-dependent, isolated source (the Bondi-Sachs metric) is considered in an effective theory which includes interactions which violate the…
The vacuum polarization in an external gravitational field due to one loop electron-positron pair and one loop millicharged fermion-antifermion pair is studied. Considering the propagation of electromagnetic (EM) radiation and gravitational…
Quantum phenomena such as vacuum polarisation in curved spacetime induce interactions between photons and gravity with quite striking consequences, including the violation of the strong equivalence principle and the apparent prediction of…
Within the low-energy effective field theories of QED and gravity, the low-energy speed of light or that of gravitational waves can typically be mildly superluminal in curved spacetimes. Related to this, small scattering time advances…
Vacuum polarization in QED in a background gravitational field induces interactions which {\it effectively} modify the classical picture of light rays, as the null geodesics of spacetime. These interactions violate the strong equivalence…
The influence of radiative corrections on the photon propagation in a gravitational background is investigated without the low-frequency approximation $\omega \ll m$. The conclusion is made in this way that the velocity of light can exceed…
With the help of the Seiberg-Witten map, one can obtain an effective action of a deformed QED from a noncommutative QED. Starting from the deformed QED, we investigate the propagation of photons in the background of electromagnetic field,…
The quantum gravity effects of vacuum polarization of gravitons propagating in a curved spacetime cause the quantum vacuum to act as a dispersive medium with a refractive index. Due to this dispersive medium gravitons acquire superluminal…
We showed in a previous paper that a wide class of nonmetric theories of gravity encompassed by the $\chi g$ formalism predict that the speed of light rays depends on the their polarization direction relative to directions singled out by…
It has been known for a long time that vacuum polarization in QED leads to a superluminal low-frequency phase velocity for light propagating in curved spacetime. Assuming the validity of the Kramers-Kronig dispersion relation, this would…
The idea that the existence of a consistent UV completion satisfying the fundamental axioms of local quantum field theory or string theory may impose positivity constraints on the couplings of the leading irrelevant operators in a…
In the wave equation obeyed by electromagnetic fields in curved spacetime there are Riemann and Ricci curvature coupling terms to the photon polarisation, which result in a polarisation dependent deviation of the photon trajectories from…
An explanation for superluminal phenomena based on wave-particle duality of photons is suggested. A single photon may be regarded as a wave packet, whose spatial extension is its coherence volume. As a photon propagates as a wave train in…
We find dispersion laws for the photon propagating in the presence of mutually orthogonal constant external electric and magnetic fields in the context of the $\theta $-expanded noncommutative QED. We show that there is no birefringence to…
When photons propagate in vacuum they may fluctuate into matter pairs thus allowing the vacuum to be polarised. This linear effect leads to charge screening and renormalisation. When exposed to an intense background field a nonlinear effect…