2011/04/30 by Brett Altschul, Matthew Mewes
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Asymmetry #Galaxy #Parity (physics) #Photon #Physics #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Redshift #Spacetime #Theoretical physics #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.84.083512
published as Phys. Rev. D 84, 083512 (2011) · 9 pages
openalex publication_date 2011/10/12 · arxiv created 2019/05/31 · arxiv updated 2019/06/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Parity violation in interactions between the spacetime metric and other fields would be a sure sign of new physics. We examine the possibility of parity violation in the cosmological redshift. If right- and left-circularly polarized photons experience the redshift differently, the radiation from distant sources would tend to be depolarized, since the polarization states would accumulate different phases during propagation. The resulting birefringence has an unusual signature---depending on z2---quite unlike what is seen in other theories, including those with violation of local boost invariance. The observed broad-spectrum polarization of \ensuremathγ-ray bursts constrains the fractional difference between the right- and left-handed redshifts at the 6\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi10^\ensuremath-37 level.