Measurement of Fresnel drag in moving media using a ring-resonator technique

Ether and Relativity

“…Or, the ether must not be dragged by the earth and contains a velocity with respect to it, in a way that the Fresnel dragging should be observed for light. This subject was investigated via the Fizeau experiment [36]- [38], and the Lorentz ether theory has also been able to explain the result of this experiment by the aid of local time dilation hypothesis. Regarding these facts, there have been some debates, comparisons and investigations about the originality and the equivalence of the Lorentz ether theory with the special theory of relativity (STR); see, e.g., Refs.…”

Fresnel Light Drag in a Coherently Driven Moving Medium

“…Phase shifts depend crucially on boundary conditions and our configuration, unlike in the historic work of Fizeau [3] where the phase shifts were produced by water flowing inside stationary tubes, realizes a situation in which the medium boundaries are in motion [10]. Note that we do not account here for small tilt angles between the surface normal and the interferometerx axis commonly employed to minimize backreflections and to avoid multiple internal reflections [9]. Such a geometry is in fact sufficient to illustrate [11] the effects of frequency and angular dispersion associated with EIT on the light drag and we then proceed to derive the phase shift for a beam single-pass even if this occurs at normal incidence.…”

“…This means that in a typical interferometric experiment no fringe shift would be observed for light propagating through a moving medium with respect to light propagating through the same medium at rest. Such a somewhat surprising conclusion holds for all velocities of experimental interest and has been found so far to hold only in the very different context of matter waves where a null drag has been observed for thermal neutrons traversing a nonresonant moving medium contained inside stationary boundaries [8].Since Fizeau's experiment various other observations of light drags have followed in which different dragging media and diverse interferometric measurement techniques have been employed, but there still remains a formidable challenge to perform high-precision measurements of light drags; these, in fact, have not yet reached the level of accuracy of other tests of special relativity [9]. In order to perform a high-precision measurement of the Fresnel-Fizeau effect one needs high sensitivity to velocity induced phase shifts, which in turn sets a lower bound for the usable sample speeds.…”

“…Since Fizeau's experiment various other observations of light drags have followed in which different dragging media and diverse interferometric measurement techniques have been employed, but there still remains a formidable challenge to perform high-precision measurements of light drags; these, in fact, have not yet reached the level of accuracy of other tests of special relativity [9]. In order to perform a high-precision measurement of the Fresnel-Fizeau effect one needs high sensitivity to velocity induced phase shifts, which in turn sets a lower bound for the usable sample speeds.…”

“…In our approach, we set all times to be identical in the laboratory frame S and we evaluate H k p ? dr along the probe optical path in the interferometric arrangement required for a typical highprecision measurement of the drag [9,12].…”