Apparent Correction to the Speed of Light in a Gravitational Potential

Abstract

The effects of physical interactions are usually incorporated into the quantum theory by including the corresponding terms in the Hamiltonian. Here we consider the effects of including the gravitational potential energy of massive particles in the Hamiltonian of quantum electrodynamics. This results in a predicted correction to the speed of light that is proportional to the fine structure constant. The correction to the speed of light obtained in this way depends on the gravitational potential and not the gravitational field, which is not gauge invariant and presumably nonphysical. Nevertheless, the predicted results are in reasonable agreement with experimental observations from Supernova 1987a.

25 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Gravity Probe B: Final Results of a Space Experiment to Test General Relativity
• Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam
• Interferometry with Bose-Einstein Condensates in Microgravity
• General Relativistic Effects in Atom Interferometry
• Revised value of the eighth-order QED contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron
• General relativistic effects in quantum interference of photons
• Does an atom interferometer test the gravitational redshift at the Compton frequency ?
• X-ray illumination of the ejecta of Supernova 1987A
• Force-Free Gravitational Redshift: Proposed Gravitational Aharonov-Bohm experiment
• General Relativistic Effects of Gravity in Quantum Mechanics -- A Case of Ultra-Relativistic, Spin 1/2 Particles --
• Spin-induced non-geodesic motion, gyroscopic precession, Wigner rotation and EPR correlations of massive spin 1/2 particles in a gravitational field
• Precision tests of General Relativity with Matter Waves
• Analysis of the SN1987A two-stage explosion hypothesis with account for the MSW neutrino flavour conversion

Cited by in corpus (7)

• GW170817 Falsifies Dark Matter Emulators
• Constraints on frequency-dependent violations of Shapiro delay from GW150914
• Constraints on differential Shapiro delay between neutrinos and photons from IceCube-170922A
• Gravitational Correction to Vacuum Polarization
• A New Set of Maxwell-Lorentz Equations and Rediscovery of Heaviside-Maxwellian (Vector) Gravity from Quantum Field Theory
• Dispersion Properties, Nonlinear Waves and Birefringence in Classical Nonlinear Electrodynamics
• Numerical calculation of the relativistic acceleration of an electron in curved spacetime using the Dirac equation