An angular rainbow of light from curved spacetime

Abstract

We try to go beyond the geometrical optics approximation, by showing that a massless polarized particle allows a wide class of non minimal interactions with an arbitrary gravitational field. One specific example of a curvature-dependent interaction is presented, that results in a frequency-dependent Faraday effect. Even in a Schwarzschild spacetime, this leads to the angular dispersion of polarization planes for a linearly-polarized beam of waves with different frequencies, propagating along the same ray.