Effect of a cosmological constant on propagation of vacuum polarized photons in stationary spacetimes

Abstract

Consideration of vacuum polarization in quantum electrodynamics may affect the momentum dispersion relation for photons for a non-trivial background, due to appearance of curvature dependent terms in the effective action. We investigate the effect of a positive cosmological constant $\Lambda$ on this at one loop order for stationary $\Lambda$-vacuum spacetimes. To the best of our knowledge, so far it has been shown that $\Lambda$ affects the propagation in a time dependent black hole spacetime. Here we consider the static de Sitter cosmic string and the Kerr-de Sitter spacetime to show that there can be some non-vanishing effect due to $\Lambda$ for physical polarizations. Consistency of these results with the polarization sum rule is discussed.