Abstract
IN a recent letter1 Pecker et al. discussed the possibility that a part of the “cosmological” redshift could result from the interaction of photons with an interstellar radiation field. Although this suggestion is old2,3, it has recently regained prominence with the discovery of the 3 K blackbody radiation. Pecker et al. discussed a formula for the energy loss of the propagating photon, v1, where Δ(v2) is the coupling constant between the propagating photon and the radiation field of frequency v2, n2 is the number density (cm−3) of the photons at v2, and δl is the length of the interaction path, in cm. Assuming that Δ(v2) is independent of v2, they suggested an experiment to determine an upper limit for its value. The proposed experiment, measuring by the Mössbauer effect the energy loss of gamma rays traversing a laser beam, is very difficult to perform. But another Mössbauer experiment was performed a number of years ago to test just this question. In that experiment4, gamma rays were propagated through a microwave cavity filled with photons of 9,234 MHz (λ≈3 cm) radiation; the fractional energy shift of the gamma rays due to the microwave field was found to be 0.4±6.0×10−16, corresponding to a value of Δ(v2)<10−33 cm−1. This limit is far smaller than the value Δ(v2)≈10−30 cm−1 proposed in ref. 1 from the analysis of solar redshift data.
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References
Pecker, J. C., Roberts, A. P., and Vigier, J. P., Nature, 237, 227 (1972).
Freundlich, E. F., Proc. Phys. Soc., A, 67, 192 (1954).
Freundlich, E. F., Phil. Mag., 45, 303 (1954).
Weiss, R., and Grodzins, L., Phys. Lett., 1, 342 (1962).
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COHEN, R., WERTHEIM, G. A Limit on the Redshift due to Interaction with Electromagnetic Radiation. Nature 241, 109 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1038/241109a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/241109a0
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