Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Scientific paper
2002-03-11
Nucl.Phys. B633 (2002) 271-294
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
27 pages, 7 figures, TeX with harvmac
Scientific paper
10.1016/S0550-3213(02)00240-7
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 that this mechanism leads to superluminal photon velocities. To confront this phenomenon with causality, however, it is necessary to extend the calculation of the phase velocity $\vp(\w)$ to high frequencies, since it is $\vp(\infty)$ which determines the characteristics of the effective wave equation and thus the causal structure. In this paper, we use a recently constructed expression, valid to all orders in a derivative expansion, for the effective action of QED in curved spacetime to determine the frequency dependence of the phase velocity and investigate whether superluminal velocities indeed persist in the high frequency limit.
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