The Pioneer anomaly: the measure of a topological phase defect of light in cosmology
arXiv:quant-ph/0501041 · doi:10.1007/s10701-005-9027-7
Abstract
It is shown that a wave vector representing a light pulse in an adiabatically evolving expanding space should develop, after a round trip (back and forth to the emitter) a geometric phase for helicity states at a given fixed position coordinate of this expanding space.In a section of the Hopf fibration of the Poincare sphere that identifies a projection to the physically allowed states, the evolution defines a parallel transported state that can be joined continuously with the initial state by means of the associated Berry-Pancharatnam connection. The connection allows to compute an anomaly in the frequency for the vector modes in terms of the scale factor of the space-time background being identical to the reported Pioneer Anomaly.
10 pages, some minor notation changes have been made. Some additional remarks were written