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We consider the nonunitary quantum dynamics of neutral massless scalar particles used to model photons around a massive gravitational lens. The gravitational interaction between the lensing mass and asymptotically free particles is described by their secondquantized scattering wavefunctions. Remarkably, the zero-point spacetime fluctuations can induce significant decoherence of the scattered states with spontaneous emission of gravitons, thereby reducing the particles' coherence as well as energy. This new effect suggests that, when photon polarizations are negligible, such quantum gravity phenomena could lead to measurable anomalous redshift of recently studied astrophysical lasers through a gravitational lens in the range of black holes and galaxy clusters.

No abstract

The configuration space of the reduced Hamiltonian formulation of quantum gravity has been shown, for non-Ricci flat metrics, to be a higher-dimensional analogue of the Teichmüller space of conformal structures on a Riemann surface. In this article we show that the configuration space of conformal connection-dynamics is naturally a higher-dimensional Teichmüller space, subject to the same condition. An immediate consequence of this result is that the Barbero-Immirzi parameter of loop quantum gravity naturally assumes a dilatonic character in all conformal canonical gravity theories.