Related papers: A Local Effective Action for Photon-Gravity Intera…
Vacuum polarisation in QED in a background gravitational field induces interactions which effectively violate the strong equivalence principle and affect the propagation of light. In the low frequency limit, Drummond and Hathrell have shown…
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…
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 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…
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 effect of vacuum polarization on the propagation of photons in curved spacetime is studied in scalar QED. A compact formula is given for the full frequency dependence of the refractive index for any background in terms of the Van…
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…
We first note that, at least in perturbation theory, there is a well-defined (subject to regularization) Lorentzian definition of the quantum effective action in both flat and curved space including (perturbative) gravity. The advantage of…
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…
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…
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…
In this paper, we seek to find a modified theory of gravity that accounts for the back-reaction of QED on curved spacetime. It is already known that vacuum fluctuations induce interactions between gravity and photons. An effective action…
Quantum theories of gravity help us to improve our insight into the gravitational interactions. Motivated by the interesting effect of gravity on the photon trajectory, we treat a quantum recipe concluding a classical interaction of light…
The construction of low-energy effective actions in QED for several types of external conditions is reviewed. Emphasis is put on the application of these effective actions to a variety of physical effects which represent a manifestation of…
In spatially structured strong laser fields, quantum electrodynamical vacuum behaves like a nonlinear Kerr medium with modulated third-order susceptibility where new coherent nonlinear effects arise due to modulation. We consider the…
The effective action for quantum fields on a $d$-dimensional spacetime can be computed using a non local expansion in powers of the curvature. We show explicitly that, for conformal fields and up to quadratic order in the curvature, the non…
The in-out formalism is a systematic and powerful method for finding the effective actions in an electromagnetic field and a curved spacetime provided that the field equation has explicitly known solutions. The effective action becomes…
We investigate the interplay between gravity and the quantum coherence present in the state of a pulse of light propagating in curved spacetime. We first introduce an operational way to distinguish between the overall shift in the pulse…
We propose relativistic tests of quantum gravity using the gravitational self-interaction of photons in a cavity. We demonstrate that this interaction results in a number of quantum gravitational signatures in the quantum state of the light…
In the framework of open quantum systems, the propagation of polarized photons can be effectively described using quantum dynamical semigroups. These extended time-evolutions induce irreversibility and dissipation. Planned, high sensitive…