Fiber Optics in Curved Space-Times
Date: January 6, 2025Time: 14:30 CET
Event: Drop Tower Seminar
Location: Bremen, Germany
Abstract: Optical fibers are a key element in the measurement of non-inertial effects in light propagation. For example, they are used in fiber-optic gyroscopes (that are sensitive to the Sagnac effect), and multiple proposals for novel experiments on the influence of gravity on light rely on light propagation in fibers to obtain long interaction times in laboratory-scale setups. However, current theoretical descriptions of such experiments rely on multiple approximations and are restricted to a limited class of fiber aligments. In this talk, I will present a novel perturbative scheme for Maxwell’s equations applied to bent fibers in general stationary space-times. Explicit calculations for step-index fibers lead to transport equations for the electromagnetic phase and polarization that include the gravitational redshift, the Sagnac effect, a generalization of Rytov's law, as well as higher-order corrections. Finally, I will comment on possible extensions of the scheme to describe more general setups. This is based on joint work with M. Hudelist (arXiv:2410.23048 [gr-qc]).
Relevant publication: Fiber optics in curved space-times.