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The Pioneer Anomaly: The Measure of a Topological Phase Defect of Light in Cosmology

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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 Poincaré sphere S2 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.

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  1. Quantum Information Group, Spanish Royal Society of Physics, Madrid, Spain

    J. L. Rosales

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  1. J. L. Rosales
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Correspondence to J. L. Rosales.

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I dedicate this paper to my daughter Ana.

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Rosales, J.L. The Pioneer Anomaly: The Measure of a Topological Phase Defect of Light in Cosmology. Found Phys 36, 396–406 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-005-9027-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-005-9027-7

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