In a dense cloud of massive fermions interacting by exchange of a light scalar field, the effective mass of the fermion can become negligibly small. As the cloud expands, the effective mass and the total energy density eventually increase with decrea
sing density. In this regime, the pressure-density relation can approximate that required for dark energy. We apply this phenomenon to the expansion of the Universe with a very light scalar field and infer relations between the parameters available and cosmological observations. Majorana neutrinos at a mass that may have been recently determined, and fermions such as the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP) may both be consistent with current observations of dark energy.
We investigate in a covariant manner the spin-induced non-geodesic motion of massive spin 1/2 particles in an arbitrary gravitational field for trajectories that are initially geodesic when spin is ignored. Using the WKB approximation for the wave fu
nction in curved spacetime, we compute the O(hbar) correction to the Wigner rotation of the spin 1/2 particle, whose O(1) contribution is zero on timelike geodesics. We develop conditions for the motion of observers in which the Wigner rotation is null. For the spherically symmetric Schwarzschild metric, we consider specific examples of particle motion in the equatorial plane for (i) circular orbits and (ii) radially infalling trajectories. For the former case we consider the entanglement for a perfectly anti-correlated EPR entangled pair of spins as the separate qubits traverse the circular orbit in same direction.
We investigate the Wigner rotation for photons, which governs the change in the polarization of the photon as it propagates through an arbitrary gravitational field. We give explicit examples in Schwarzschild spacetime, and compare with the correspon
ding flat spacetime results, which by the equivalence principle, holds locally at each spacetime point. We discuss the implications of the Wigner rotation for entangled photon states in curved spacetime, and lastly develop a sufficient condition for special (Fermi-Walker) frames in which the observer would detect no Wigner rotation.
In a recent paper, oscillations observed in the electron capture probability were attributed to the mixing of neutrino mass eigenstates. This paper is shown to be in error in two respects.
