Spectral Line Broadening and Angular Blurring due to Spacetime Geometry Fluctuations
Abstract
We treat two possible phenomenological effects of quantum fluctuations of spacetime geometry: spectral line broadening and angular blurring of the image of a distance source. A geometrical construction will be used to express both effects in terms of the Riemann tensor correlation function. We apply the resulting expressions to study some explicit examples in which the fluctuations arise from a bath of gravitons in either a squeezed state or a thermal state. In the case of a squeezed state, one has two limits of interest: a coherent state which exhibits classical time variation but no fluctuations, and a squeezed vacuum state, in which the fluctuations are maximized.
Cite
@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0601137,
title = {Spectral Line Broadening and Angular Blurring due to Spacetime Geometry Fluctuations},
author = {R. T. Thompson and L. H. Ford},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0601137},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
21 pages, 2 figures. Dedicated to Raphael Sorkin on the occasion of his 60th birthday. (v2: several references added and some minor errors corrected)