2011/11/08 by Marcel Urban, M. Urban, F. Couchot +5 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #General Physics (physics.gen-ph) #physics.gen-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1111.1847
Submitted to International Journal of Modern Physics A. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1106.3996
arxiv created 2011/11/08 · openalex publication_date 2011/11/08 · arxiv updated 2011/11/09 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We admit that the vacuum is not empty but is filled with continuously appearing and disappearing virtual fermion pairs. We show that if we simply model the propagation of the photon in vacuum as a series of transient captures within the virtual pairs, we can derive the finite light velocity c as the average delay on the photon propagation. We then show that the vacuum permittivity ε0 and permeability μ0 originate from the polarization and the magnetization of the virtual fermions pairs. Since the transit time of a photon is a statistical process within this model, we expect it to be fluctuating. We discuss experimental tests of this prediction. We also study vacuum saturation effects under high photon density conditions.