A Local Effective Action for Photon-Gravity Interactions

Abstract

Quantum phenomena such as vacuum polarisation in curved spacetime induce interactions between photons and gravity with quite striking consequences, including the violation of the strong equivalence principle and the apparent prediction of `superluminal' photon propagation. These quantum interactions can be encoded in an effective action. In this paper, we extend previous results on the effective action for QED in curved spacetime due to Barvinsky, Vilkovisky and others and present a new, local effective action valid to all orders in a derivative expansion, as required for a full analysis of the quantum theory of high-frequency photon propagation in gravitational fields.

22 pages, 9 figures, harvmac TeX

References in corpus (1)

• Accelerating Photons with Gravitational Radiation

Cited by in corpus (22)

• Gravity, Lorentz Violation, and the Standard Model
• Strong Equivalence, Lorentz and CPT Violation, Anti-Hydrogen Spectroscopy and Gamma-Ray Burst Polarimetry
• Superluminality and UV Completion
• The Refractive Index of Curved Spacetime: the Fate of Causality in QED
• Positivity Bounds and the Massless Spin-2 Pole
• QED positivity bounds
• The Causal Structure of QED in Curved Spacetime: Analyticity and the Refractive Index
• Causality Constraints on Gravitational Effective Field Theories
• Reverse Bootstrapping: IR lessons for UV physics
• Asymptotic states and renormalization in Lorentz-violating quantum field theory
• One-loop corrections to the photon propagator in the curved-space QED
• Aspects of Nonlocality in Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Gravity and Cosmology
• The Refractive Index of Curved Spacetime II: QED, Penrose Limits and Black Holes
• Propagation in a thermal graviton background
• Heat kernel expansion in the covariant perturbation theory
• Heat-kernel approach for scattering
• Quantum Corrections to Pair Production of Charged Black Holes in de Sitter Space
• Low-energy electromagnetic radiation as an indirect probe of black-hole evaporation
• Non-minimally coupled electromagnetic fields and observable implications for primordial black holes
• Electric Charge Screening By Non-Minimal Couplings Of Electromagnetic Fields To Gravity
• Covariant perturbation expansion of off-diagonal heat kernel
• Non-Minimally Coupled Einstein-Yang-Mills Field Equations and Wu-Yang Monopoles in Bertotti-Robinson Spacetimes