0000000001043903
AUTHOR
Adrian Del Rio
Electromagnetic Duality Anomaly in Curved Spacetimes
The source-free Maxwell action is invariant under electric-magnetic duality rotations in arbitrary spacetimes. This leads to a conserved classical Noether charge. We show that this conservation law is broken at the quantum level in presence of a background classical gravitational field with a non-trivial Chern-Pontryagin invariant, in a parallel way to the chiral anomaly for massless Dirac fermions. Among the physical consequences, the net polarization of the quantum electromagnetic field is not conserved.
Classical and quantum aspects of electric-magnetic duality rotations in curved spacetimes
It is well known that the source-free Maxwell equations are invariant under electric-magnetic duality rotations, $\mathrm{F}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\mathrm{F}\mathrm{cos}\ensuremath{\theta}+^{\ensuremath{\star}}\mathrm{F}\mathrm{sin}\ensuremath{\theta}$. These transformations are indeed a symmetry of the theory in the Noether sense. The associated constant of motion is the difference in the intensity between self-dual and anti-self-dual components of the electromagnetic field or, equivalently, the difference between the right and left circularly polarized components. This conservation law holds even if the electromagnetic field interacts with an arbitrary classical gravitational background.…
Precessing binary black holes as engines of electromagnetic helicity
We show that binary black hole mergers with precessing evolution can potentially excite photons from the quantum vacuum in such a way that total helicity is not preserved in the process. Helicity violation is allowed by quantum fluctuations that spoil the electric-magnetic duality symmetry of the classical Maxwell theory without charges. We show here that precessing binary black hole systems in astrophysics generate a flux of circularly polarized gravitational waves which, in turn, provides the required helical background that triggers this quantum effect. Solving the fully non-linear Einstein's equations with numerical relativity we explore the parameter space of binary systems and extract…
Equivalence of Adiabatic and DeWitt-Schwinger renormalization schemes
We prove that adiabatic regularization and DeWitt-Schwinger point-splitting provide the same result for the renormalized expectation values of the stress-energy tensor for spin-$1/2$ fields. This generalizes the equivalence found for scalar fields, which is here recovered in a different way. We also argue that the coincidence limit of the DeWitt-Schwinger proper time expansion of the two-point function exactly agrees with the analogous expansion defined by the adiabatic regularization method at any order (for both scalar and spin-$1/2$ fields). We also illustrate the power of the adiabatic method to compute higher order DeWitt coefficients in FLRW universes.