Photon Propagation in Space-Time with a Compactified Spatial Dimension

Abstract

The one-loop effects of vacuum polarization induced by untwisted fermions in QED in a nonsimply connected space-time with topology $S^1\times R^3$ are investigated. It is found that photon propagation in this system is anisotropic, appearing several massive photon modes and a superluminal transverse mode. For small compactification radius $a$, the superluminal velocity increases logarithmically with $a$. At low energies the photon masses lead to an effective confinement of the gauge fields into a (2+1)-dimensional manifold transverse to the compactified direction. The system shows a topologically induced directional superconductivity.

5 pages, to appear in PLB

References in corpus (4)

• Light propagation in non-trivial QED vacua
• The velocities of light in modified QED vacua
• Thermal Quantum Fields in Static Electromagnetic Backgrounds
• Phase Transition in Anyon Superconductivity at Finite Temperature

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Neutrino Propagation in a Strongly Magnetized Medium
• Quantum field theory on toroidal topology: algebraic structure and applications
• One-loop corrections to the photon propagator in the curved-space QED
• Superluminal pions in a hadronic fluid
• Report of the Detailed Calculation of the Effective Potential in Spacetimes with $S^1\times R^d$ Topology and at Finite Temperature
• Inverse and Dynamical Supersymmetry Breaking in $S^1\times R^3$