相关论文: Causality and Superluminal Light
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…
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 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…
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 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…
We consider how causality and micro-causality are realised in QED in curved spacetime. The photon propagator is found to exhibit novel non-analytic behaviour due to vacuum polarization, which invalidates the Kramers-Kronig dispersion…
It has been known for a long time that vacuum polarization in QED leads to a superluminal low-frequency phase velocity for light propagating in curved spacetime. Assuming the validity of the Kramers-Kronig dispersion relation, this would…
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 quantum gravity effects of vacuum polarization of gravitons propagating in a curved spacetime cause the quantum vacuum to act as a dispersive medium with a refractive index. Due to this dispersive medium gravitons acquire superluminal…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The idea that the existence of a consistent UV completion satisfying the fundamental axioms of local quantum field theory or string theory may impose positivity constraints on the couplings of the leading irrelevant operators in a…
Since almost all phenomena electrodynamics deal with have energy scales much lower than the Higgs mass energy and intermediate boson energy, electrodynamics of continuous media should be applicable and the constitutive relation of…
The expression of causality depends on an underlying choice of chronology. Since a chronology is provided by any Lorentzian metric in relativistic theories, there are as many expressions of causality as there are non-conformally related…
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…
Interactions incorporating the vacuum polarization effects in curved backgrounds modify the null cone structure in such a way that the photon trajectories would not be the space-time geodesics anymore. The gravitational birefringence…