Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Scientific paper
2011-05-27
Phys.Rev.D84:044026,2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Added references, 13 pages
Scientific paper
10.1103/PhysRevD.84.044026
The main goal of the present paper is to study how polarization of photons affects their motion in a gravitational field created by a rotating massive compact object. We study propagation of the circularly polarized beams of light in a stationary gravitational field. We use (3+1)-form of the Maxwell equations to derive a master equation for the propagation of monochromatic electromagnetic waves of the frequency $\omega$ with a given helicity. We first analize its solutions in the high frequency approximation using the `standard' geometrical optics approach. After that we demonstrate how this `standard' approach can be modified in order to include the effect of the helicity of photons on their motion. Such an improved method reproduces the standard results of the geometrical optics at short distances. However, it modifies the asymptotic behavior of the circularly polarized beams in the late-time regime. We demonstrate that the corresponding equations for the circularly polarized beam can be effectively obtained by modification of the background geometry by including a small factor proportional to $\omega^{-1}$ whose sign corresponds to photon helicity. We obtain the modified equations for circularly polarized rays by using such a `renormalization' procedure, and calculate the corresponding renormalization term for the Kerr geometry.
Frolov Valeri P.
Shoom Andrey A.
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