Related papers: Backscattering: an overlooked effect of General Re…
When a laser passes through underdense plasmas, Raman and Brillouin Backscattering can reflect a substantial portion of the incident laser energy. This is a major loss mechanism, for example, in employing lasers in inertial confinement…
We study graviton scattering in the presence of higher dimensional operators - particularly, R^4 - arising from loop effects. We find that the results do not correspond to any known terms in the effective action of Matrix Theory, thus…
[Abridged] The transmission of light through a planetary atmosphere can be studied as a function of altitude and wavelength using stellar or solar occultations, giving often unique constraints on the atmospheric composition. For exoplanets,…
Thirty-five years after the discovery of rotation-powered pulsars, we still do not understand the fundamentals of their pulsed emission at any wavelength. Even detailed pulse profiles cannot identify the location of the emission in a…
The interest in the implications that astrophysical observations have for the understanding of the structure of black holes has grown since the first detection of gravitational waves. Many arguments that are put forward in order to…
The afterglows to gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are due to synchrotron emission from shocks generated as an ultra-relativistic outflow decelerates. A forward and a reverse shock will form, however, where emission from the forward shock is well…
In gravitational microlensing, binary systems may act as lenses or sources. Identifying lens binarity is generally easy especially in events characterized by caustic crossing since the resulting light curve exhibits strong deviations from…
Quantum gravity is quite elusive at the experimental level; thus a lot of interest has been raised by recent searches for quantum gravity effects in the propagation of light from distant sources, like gamma ray bursters and active galactic…
Stars and black holes are sources of gravitational radiation in many phases of their life, and the signals they emit exhibit features that are characteristic of the generating process. Emitted since the beginning of star formation, these…
Real world quantum systems are open to perpetual influence from the wider environment. Quantum gravitational fluctuations provide a most fundamental source of the environmental influence through their universal interactions with all forms…
The large scale pattern in the arrival directions of extragalactic cosmic rays that reach the Earth is different from that of the flux arriving to the halo of the Galaxy as a result of the propagation through the galactic magnetic field.…
Retrolensing is a gravitational lensing effect in which light emitted by a background source is deflected by a black hole and redirected toward the observer after undergoing nearly complete loops around the black hole. In this context, we…
The effective field theory of quantum gravity generically predicts non-locality to be present in the effective action, which results from the low-energy propagation of gravitons and massless matter. Working to second order in gravitational…
Observational data from the ESA astrometric mission Gaia determining the positions of celestial objects within an accuracy of few microarcseconds will be soon fully available. Other satellite-based space missions are currently planned to…
No surface is perfectly planar at all scales. The notion of flatness of a surface therefore depends on the size of the probe used to observe it. As a consequence rough interfaces are abundant in nature. Here the old, but still active field…
Frame-dragging effect manifests itself as polarization direction rotation when linearly polarized electromagnetic/gravitational wave scatters from a spinning point source through gravitational interactions, an effect also known as the…
Gravitational lensing caused by the gravitational field of massive objects has been studied and acknowledged for a long period of time. In this paper, however, we propose a different mechanism where the bending of light stems from the…
The existence of a primordial magnetic field at the last scattering surface may induce a measurable Faraday rotation in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. We calculate the magnitude of this effect by evolving the radiative…
We employ scattering amplitudes in curved space to model the dynamics of a light probe particle with mass $m$ orbiting in the background spacetime induced by a heavy gravitational source with mass $M$. Observables are organized as an…
We study the motion of test particles in the metric of a localized and slowly rotating astronomical source, within the framework of linear gravitoelectromagnetism, grounded on a Post-Minkowskian approximation of general relativity. Special…