Related papers: ``Faster than Light'' Photons in Gravitational Fie…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It has been found in several papers that, because of quantum corrections, light front can propagate with superluminal velocity in gravitational fields and even in flat space-time across two conducting plates. We show that, if this is the…
The one-loop effective action for QED in curved spacetime contains equivalence principle violating interactions between the electromagnetic field and the spacetime curvature. These interactions lead to the dependence of photon velocity on…
We investigate the phenomenon of "faster than light" photons in a family of dilaton black hole spacetimes. For radially directed photons, we find that their light-cone condition is modified even though the spacetimes are spherically…
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…
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…
In quantum theory, the curved spacetime of Einstein's general theory of relativity acts as a dispersive optical medium for the propagation of light. Gravitational rainbows and birefringence replace the classical picture of light rays…
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 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…
Local superluminal photon propagation arises at $\mathcal{O}(\alpha/m_e^2)$ in the Drummond Hathrell (DH) effective action obtained by integrating out the electron in QED coupled to gravity. Whether such superluminality implies a genuine…
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…
Gravitational tidal forces acting on the virtual e+ e- cloud surrounding a photon endow spacetime with a non-trivial refractive index. This has remarkable properties unique to gravitational theories including superluminal low-frequency…
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,…
Recently, various types of regular black hole model are reintroduced as the solution of the Einstein equations coupled with nonlinear electrodynamics (NED). In NED, it is known that photons do not propagate along the null geodesics of the…