paper

Propagation of light in area metric backgrounds

arXiv:0711.3771 · doi:10.1088/0264-9381/26/3/035024

Abstract

The propagation of light in area metric spacetimes, which naturally emerge as refined backgrounds in quantum electrodynamics and quantum gravity, is studied from first principles. In the geometric-optical limit, light rays are found to follow geodesics in a Finslerian geometry, with the Finsler norm being determined by the area metric tensor. Based on this result, and an understanding of the non-linear relation between ray vectors and wave covectors in such refined backgrounds, we study light deflection in spherically symmetric situations, and obtain experimental bounds on the non-metricity of spacetime in the solar system.

18pp, no figures, Journal version

References in corpus (7)