Rostock 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 54: Precision Measurements and Metrology III
Q 54.5: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 14. März 2019, 15:15–15:30, S SR 111 Maschb.
Gravitational properties of light — •Dennis Rätzel1, Ralf Menzel2, and Martin Wilkens2 — 1Institut für Physik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 12489 Berlin, Germany — 2University of Potsdam, Institute for Physics and Astronomy Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24/25, 14476 Potsdam
As Einstein's equations tell us that all energy is a source of gravity, light must gravitate. However, because changes of the gravitational field propagate with the speed of light, the gravitational effect of light differs significantly from that of massive objects. In particular, the gravitational force induced by a light pulse is due only to its creation and annihilation and decays with the inverse of the distance to the pulse.
We can expect the gravitational field of light to be extremely weak. However, the properties of light are premises in the foundations of modern physics: they were used to derive special and general relativity and are the basis of the concept of time and causality in many alternative models. Studying the back-reaction of light on the gravitational field could give new fundamental insights to our understanding of space and time as well as classical and quantum gravity.
In this talk, a brief overview is given of the gravitational field of one-dimensional light pulses and Gaussian beams with finite divergence in the framework of general relativity. A glimpse is caught of the gravitational interaction of two single photons which turns out to depend on the degree of their polarization entanglement.