Inquiring electromagnetic quantum fluctuations about the orientability of space

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that electromagnetic quantum fluctuations can be used to locally determine the orientability of Minkowski spacetime, providing a potential method to probe topological properties without global measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to detect spatial orientability through local quantum electromagnetic effects on particles and dipoles in Minkowski spacetime.

Findings

Distinguishes orientable from non-orientable topologies using particle indicators.

Identifies a characteristic inversion pattern in dipole indicators as a signature of non-orientability.

Proposes a possible experimental setup to probe spacetime topology locally.

Abstract

Orientability is an important topological property of spacetime manifolds. It is generally assumed that a test for spatial orientability requires a journey across the whole 3-space to check for orientation-reversing paths. Since such a global expedition is not feasible, theoretical arguments that combine universality of physical experiments with local arrow of time, CP violation and CPT invariance are offered to support the choosing of time- and space-orientable spacetime manifolds. We show that it is possible to access spatial orientability of Minkowski spacetime through local physical effects involving quantum electromagnetic fluctuations. To this end, we study the motions of a charged particle and an electric dipole under these fluctuations in Minkowski spacetime with orientable and non-orientable spatial topologies. We derive expressions for an orientability indicator for both point-like particles in two spatially flat topologies. For the particle, we show that it is possible to distinguish the orientable from the non-orientable topology by contrasting the evolution of the indicators. This shows that it is possible to access orientability through electromagnetic quantum fluctuations.The answer to the question on how to locally probe the orientability of Minkowski 3-space intrinsically arises in the study of the dipole's motions. We find that a characteristic inversion pattern exhibited by the dipole indicator curves is a signature of non-orientability. This result makes it clear that it is possible to locally unveil spatial non-orientability by the inversion pattern of orientability indicator curves of an electric dipole under electromagnetic fluctuations. Our findings open the way to a conceivable experiment involving quantum electromagnetic fluctuations to locally probe the spatial orientability on the microscopic scale of Minkowski spacetime.