The Pioneer anomaly: the measure of a topological phase defect of light in cosmology

TL;DR

This paper proposes that the Pioneer anomaly can be explained by a topological phase defect of light caused by geometric phases in an expanding universe, linking cosmological expansion to observed frequency shifts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel topological phase defect model of light in cosmology, connecting geometric phases to the Pioneer anomaly.

Findings

The geometric phase leads to a frequency anomaly matching the Pioneer anomaly.

The model links the scale factor of the universe to observable frequency shifts.

It provides a topological explanation for the Pioneer anomaly based on light's evolution in expanding space.

Abstract

It is shown that a wave vector representing a light pulse in an adiabatically evolving expanding space should develop, after a round trip (back and forth to the emitter) a geometric phase for helicity states at a given fixed position coordinate of this expanding space.In a section of the Hopf fibration of the Poincare sphere that identifies a projection to the physically allowed states, the evolution defines a parallel transported state that can be joined continuously with the initial state by means of the associated Berry-Pancharatnam connection. The connection allows to compute an anomaly in the frequency for the vector modes in terms of the scale factor of the space-time background being identical to the reported Pioneer Anomaly.