Related papers: Faster than light' photons and charged black holes
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…
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 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…
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 photon vacuum polarization effect in curved spacetime leads to birefringence, i.e. the photon velocity becomes greater than (or less than) the speed of light depending on its polarization. We investigate this phenomenon in a…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We consider nonstandard photons from nonbirefringent modified Maxwell theory and discuss their propagation in a fixed Schwarzschild spacetime background. This particular modification of Maxwell theory is Lorentz-violating and allows for…
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…
We derive the wave equation obeyed by electromagnetic fields in curved spacetime. We find that there are Riemann and Ricci curvature coupling terms to the photon polarisation which result in a polarisation dependent deviation of the photon…
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…
We consider the problem of propagation of photons in the quantum theory of non-relativistic matter coupled to electromagnetic radiation, which is, presently, the only consistent quantum theory of matter and radiation. Assuming that the…
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…
There are reasons (which we enumerate) to think that an infinite extra dimension will harbor a black hole. In this case, brane-localized modes of gravity and gauge fields become quasilocalized, and light from a distant object can become…