2018/10/24 by Jan Kohlrus, Kohlrus, Jan, Jorma Louko +5 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Geophysics and Sensor Technology #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.10502
We study relativistic effects on polarised photons that travel in a curved spacetime. As a concrete application, we consider photons in the gravitational field of the Earth, on a closed path that starts at a terrestial laboratory, is reflected at one or more satellites, and finally returns to the laboratory. We find that the photons acquire a non-trivial Wigner phase already when the gravitational field is static, such as the Schwarzschild spacetime, where previous studies have found a trivial Wigner phase for closed photon paths. A gauge-invariant description of this nontrivial Wigner phase remains an open question, to be resolved before the formalism can provide predictions for experiments.