Genuine two-dimensional rest mass of photons in a planar optical cavity

Orateur : Maxime RICHARD

It is a well established and understood fact that photons propagating in free space do interact with the gravitational field, which leads to effects such as the gravitational redshift or gravitational lensing. While these phenomena might give an impression that photons in free space have a sort of mass, this impression is easily proved wrong upon considering their dispersion relation : the photon mass is undoubtedly zero. But when photons are brought to a full stop within a planar cavity, this is another story, and they do acquire a true mass, albeit one that makes sense in a 2D space. In this talk I will discuss the "trueness" of this mass in terms of inertial and gravitatonial properties of these photons, and raise questions on the "intrinsicness" of such a physical quantity.

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