The `missing baryons of the near universe are believed to be principally in a partially ionized state. Although passing electromagnetic waves are dispersed by the plasma, the effect has hitherto not been utilized as a means of detection because it is
generally believed that a successful observation requires the background source to be highly variable, ie~the class of sources that could potentially deliver a verdict is limited. We argue in two stages that this condition is not necessary. First, by modeling the fluctuations on macroscopic scales as interference between wave packets we show that, in accordance with the ideas advanced by Einstein in 1917, both the behavior of photons as bosons (ie~the intensity variance has contributions from Poisson and phase noise) and the van-Cittert-Zernike theorem are a consequence of wave-particle duality. Nevertheless, we then point out that in general the variance on some macroscopic timescale $tau$ consists of (a) a main contributing term $propto 1/tau$, plus (b) a small negative term $propto 1/tau^2$ due to the finite size of the wave packets. If the radiation passes through a dispersive medium, this size will be enlarged well beyond its vacuum minimum value of $Delta t approx 1/Delta u$, leading to a more negative (b) term (while (a) remains unchanged) and hence a suppression of the variance w.r.t. the vacuum scenario. The phenomenon, which is typically at the few parts in 10$^5$ level, enables one to measure cosmological dispersion in principle. Signal-to-noise estimates, along with systematic issues and how to overcome them, will be presented.
For each photon wave packet of extragalactic light, the dispersion by line-of-sight intergalactic plasma causes an increase in the envelope width and a chirp (drift) in the carrier frequency. It is shown that for continuous emission of many temporall
y overlapping wave packets with random epoch phases, such as quasars in the radio band, this in turn leads to quasi-periodic variations in the intensity of the arriving light on timescales between the coherence time (defined as the reciprocal of the bandwidth of frequency selection, taken here as of order 0.01 GHz for radio observations) and the stretched envelope, with most of the fluctuation power on the latter scale which is typically in the millisecond range for intergalactic dispersion. Thus, by monitoring quasar light curves on such short scales, it should be possible to determine the line-of-sight plasma column along the many directions and distances to the various quasars, affording one a 3-dimensional picture of the ionized baryons in the near universe.
We theoretically study the carrier-envelope phase dependent inversion generated in a two-level system by excitation with a few-cycle pulse. Based on the invariance of the inversion under time reversal of the exciting field, parameters are introduced
to characterize the phase sensitivity of the induced inversion. Linear and nonlinear phase effects are numerically studied for rectangular and sinc-shaped pulses. Furthermore, analytical results are obtained in the limits of weak fields as well as strong dephasing, and by nearly degenerate perturbation theory for sinusoidal excitation. The results show that the phase sensitive inversion in the ideal two-level system is a promising route for constructing carrier-envelope phase detectors.
