An angular rainbow of light from curved spacetime

Abstract

We try to go beyond the geometrical optics approximation, by showing that a massless polarized particle allows a wide class of non minimal interactions with an arbitrary gravitational field. One specific example of a curvature-dependent interaction is presented, that results in a frequencydependent Faraday effect. Even in a Schwarzschild spacetime, this leads to the angular dispersion of polarization planes for a linearly-polarized beam of waves with different frequencies, propagating along the same ray.

Integrable isotropic profiles for polarized light

“…The proposed deformations restores all the symmetries of the initial systems with Maxwell's fisheye and Luneburg profiles, which were broken after the inclusion of polarization. Let us notice, that for the inclusion of polarization one should extend the initial physical space by additional, isospin degrees of freedom [6] (see also [7] and refs therein), which seems intuitively artificial. Otherwise, one can extend the initial optical Lagrangian by the additional terms depending on higher derivatives [8].…”