Talk detail

Participant	Rogers, Adam
Institution	University of Manitoba - 30A Sifton Road - Winnipeg - Manitoba - Canada

Session	GL3	Accepted		Order	Time
Talk	Oral abstract	Title	Gravitational Lensing by Compact Objects Within Plasma
Coauthors
Abstract	Frequency-dependent lens effects are found for trajectories of electromagnetic rays passing through a distribution of plasma near a massive object. Ray propagation through plasma in curved space-time adds extra terms to the equations of motion that depend on the plasma refractive index. For low-frequency rays these refractive effects can dominate, turning the gravitational lens into a mirror. While light rays in a constant density medium behave like particles with an effective mass given by the plasma frequency, an inhomogeneous plasma introduces more complicated behavior even for the spherically symmetric case. As an illustrative physical example the pulse profile of a compact object sheathed in dense plasma is examined, which introduces dramatic frequency-dependent shifts from the behavior in vacuum.
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