The refractive index of curved spacetime: The fate of causality in QED

Abstract

It has been known for a long time that vacuum polarization in QED leads to a superluminal low-frequency phase velocity for light propagating in curved spacetime. Assuming the validity of the Kramers–Kronig dispersion relation, this would imply a superluminal wavefront velocity and the violation of causality. Here, we calculate for the first time the full frequency dependence of the refractive index using world-line sigma model techniques together with the Penrose plane wave limit of spacetime in the neighbourhood of a null geodesic. We find that the high-frequency limit of the phase velocity (i.e. the wavefront velocity) is always equal to c and causality is assured. However, the Kramers–Kronig dispersion relation is violated due to a non-analyticity of the refractive index in the upper-half complex plane, whose origin may be traced to the generic focusing property of null geodesic congruences and the existence of conjugate points. This makes the issue of micro-causality, i.e. the vanishing of commutators of field operators at spacelike separated points, a subtle one in local quantum field theory in curved spacetime.